They walked beneath a sky that did not turn.
There was no sun in the Seventh Layer. No moon, no rotation, no passage of time — only pressure. The kind that soaked through skin and settled in bones. Like guilt. Like silence. Like a truth that couldn't be escaped.
The girls followed without complaint. That, at least, was something. Rias walked with her jaw set, her posture still regal despite everything. Akeno moved like a shadow with heat behind her eyes, but kept her mouth shut.
Sunny appreciated silence.
He led them over jagged ridges and razor-choked hollows until they reached a cracked basin filled with the remnants of a shattered monument. Someone, long ago, had tried to build something holy here.
It had failed.
Which made it the perfect place to rest.
He sat against the blackened stone and watched the horizon while the two devils slumped down nearby.
They didn't ask where they were going.
But eventually, one of them had to break it.
"This can't be the normal starting point for people like us," Rias said.
Sunny didn't look at her.
"It's not."
She waited, but he didn't offer more.
Akeno tilted her head. "Then where do they normally start?"
"The Forgotten Shore."
Rias frowned. "That doesn't sound much better."
Sunny smirked faintly. "It's not. But it's survivable. A place with structure. Rules. Time. I started there, like everyone else."
She caught the edge in his voice.
"So why didn't we?"
Sunny shrugged. "You bypassed the gate. Broke in through the ceiling. The Dream didn't know where to sort you. So it dumped you here."
"Into the final layer."
"Into hell," Sunny corrected.
---
They were quiet for a long while.
Eventually, Akeno asked, "Then how do we get out? If this is a dream, where's the waking point?"
Sunny finally looked at her. Not cruel. Not kind.
Just blunt.
"There is a way. Every Nightmare has a Gate. You find it, survive the trial, and you leave."
Rias narrowed her eyes. "Then where is the Gate for this one?"
Sunny looked past them — not at the horizon, but deeper. Toward something no one else could see.
"I don't know."
Akeno flinched. Rias's breath caught.
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"No one does," Sunny said flatly. "No one's ever left the Seventh Nightmare. Not alive. Not awake. I don't know if the Gate is hidden... or if it's waiting to be made."
Rias stared at him. "So you're saying we're stuck."
"I'm saying if there's a way out, it won't be a map. It'll be a mistake we earn."
---
Akeno shifted closer. "What about you? How did you get here? Why are you different?"
Sunny's face went blank.
"No."
She blinked. "What?"
"You ask about the world, I'll answer. You ask about me, I won't."
Rias narrowed her eyes. "Because you don't trust us."
"Exactly."
He stood. Checked the wind — there was none. Listened to the stone — it was humming faintly.
"We move in an hour. Don't sleep. Not here. Too many old prayers in the walls."
He walked away, leaving them in the shadow of the broken monument.
And above them, far off in the sky, something shifted that should not have moved.
---
The next leg of the journey had no direction. No goal.
There was nothing to find — only something to avoid.
Death. Madness. The next mistake.
So they walked. Sometimes across plains of ash. Sometimes through forests made of bone. Sometimes over bridges held aloft by nothing but memory and bad decisions.
They walked.
And they ate.
They adapted.
And deep in the back of Sunny's mind, something whispered that this wasn't adaptation.
It was absorption.
The Dream was teaching them.
And worse — they were learning.
---
It was Akeno who brought it up.
They were camped inside the hollowed shell of some long-dead creature, curled against the dry warmth of its bone cavity. She held out her hands and stared at her palms.
"Our power's still inside us. I feel it. It's like... it's behind a door."
Rias nodded. "Locked. Not gone."
"I think it's because this place doesn't have rules. Not the same ones. Our magic used to obey laws. Here... laws bend."
"So maybe," Akeno said slowly, "we don't need rules. Maybe we just need... will."
Sunny listened. He didn't speak.
Rias stood and closed her eyes.
She visualized a simple flame. No chant. No formula. Just the image of heat in her hand.
Nothing happened.
Akeno tried lightning. A small current. She growled with focus. Still nothing.
But they didn't stop.
They kept trying.
Over and over.
And eventually... something flickered.
Not a spell.
Not a construct.
Just color. Like a stain of aura in the air.
Sunny saw it and didn't react.
He just turned his head toward the dark.
"If your magic is tied to imagination," he muttered, "then be careful what you imagine. This place is listening."
---
Later that night, Rias stood alone under the broken arch of twisted bone and focused again. Not on fire — not on something small. On her origin.
The Power of Destruction.
She saw it clearly — the crimson-black tide that flowed in her blood. The inheritance of her mother. A force so raw it unraveled reality where it touched. It didn't burn. It erased.
She raised one hand. The air shimmered around her palm. Heatless. Silent. Then —
Crack.
A shard of stone in front of her split in half. Disintegrated into dust.
She didn't smile. But her hand trembled.
She was still herself.
---
Akeno was slower to show results.
She didn't have the raw authority of a Devil Princess. What she had instead — what she was — was contradiction.
Human and Fallen.
Holy and cursed.
Her power was inherited from Baraqiel — one of the first and strongest Fallen Angels to ever fall. Her Holy Lightning wasn't a gift. It was a weapon. One no realm could ignore.
She opened her arms and called to the storm inside her.
And her wings — black and feathered — erupted behind her back in a crack of light and heat.
Six at first. Then eight.
She lit the sky with streaks of white fire.
The bones around them sizzled.
Sunny stared up at the unnatural light.
Akeno lowered herself back to the earth, panting.
Rias caught her.
"You okay?"
Akeno smiled faintly. "Still hurts... but it works."
---
The sky rumbled.
Not thunder.
Not weather.
Something else.
Sunny stood, blade half-drawn.
The Dream was listening.
And something in it had noticed them.
The stone beneath their feet groaned.
Above them, far off in the high dark, a shape unfolded.
A thing without eyes, without name, with wings that didn't flap but whispered.
It circled once.
Then began to descend.
Rias's power flared in her hand.
Akeno stood beside her, lightning licking her fingertips.
Sunny didn't say run.
He didn't say fight.
He just stepped forward.
And the three of them stood together as the Dream sent its first real answer.