Ch.1
I woke up in a bed that was too short, with light coming from the wrong side of the room, and for about three seconds I lay there trying to figure out what was off before the rest of it hit me.
This was not my apartment.
The room was small. Japanese-style small. A desk with textbooks stacked on one corner, a rolling chair, a bookshelf that held the kind of manga collection you'd expect from a teenage boy and some stuff you wouldn't put on a shelf if you had any self-respect. Posters on the wall. An alarm clock on the nightstand showing some hour I didn't focus on because my hands were on the blanket and they looked wrong.
I turned them over. The fingers were shorter. Younger. The skin was lighter than I remembered and there was a callus on my right index finger that I'd never earned.
I got out of bed and found the mirror on the back of the closet door.
Brown hair, messy from sleep. Brown eyes. Average. The kind of face I'd watched through sixty-something episodes of anime, except now it was looking back at me and moving when I moved. Issei Hyoudou. I was Issei Hyoudou.
The panic was real. Chest tight, hands shaking, breathing going fast and shallow. I stood there gripping the edge of the closet door until my knuckles went white, and then it passed. All of it. Gone. And what was left didn't feel like panic at all.
I was standing in a world where devils, angels, fallen angels, and dragons were real. Where magic worked. Where the most gorgeous women across every mythology walked around in school uniforms and combat lingerie.
I grinned. It stretched across my whole face, and I didn't bother stopping it.
"Oh," I said out loud, and even my voice was wrong. Younger. Less resonance. "Oh, this is-"
"You are not my previous host."
I stopped breathing.
The voice came from inside my skull. Low and ancient. It vibrated in my chest like standing too close to a speaker at a concert, and my teeth buzzed with it. Heavy. Massive. Like a woman who'd been smoking for ten thousand years, if that woman was also the size of a mountain and could burn nations to ash.
Ddraig. The Red Dragon Emperor. Except the voice was wrong. Every version I'd watched, every clip I'd played on my phone between classes, Ddraig had been deep and male and booming. This was deep, absolutely, but female. Unmistakably.
"Your soul is…" A long pause. "Wrong. Different. The container is the same. The contents are not."
I stared at Issei's reflection and kept my expression neutral.
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
"Lie."
One word. Flat, no heat. A correction, delivered the same way you'd tell someone their shoe was untied.
"I woke up feeling different," I tried. "Maybe it's-"
"The previous soul was a boy who dreamed of breasts and very little else. His ambitions were loud. His depth was not. You are neither of those things." Another pause, and I could feel her attention pressing against the inside of my skull. Testing. A weight leaning in. "You are calm. You have not screamed once. Every host before you screamed when I spoke."
"Maybe I'm just not a screamer."
Silence. Disapproval radiating off it like heat.
I let it stretch. Ddraig was a lot of things, all of them terrifying, but she was also trapped in a Sacred Gear strapped to my soul. She couldn't exactly leave. And I wasn't going to hand over the truth of what I was, because that truth was the only real advantage I had in a world that was about to try to kill me in a couple of days.
"…Interesting."
The pressure receded. She was still there. I could feel her, the awareness of being watched from somewhere that didn't have a direction. But she pulled back. Deciding that I was a puzzle worth taking her time on.
Fine. I could work with that.
I got dressed. The Kuoh Academy uniform was hanging on the closet door and it took me longer than I wanted to admit to figure out the collar ribbon. Black blazer, white button-down, black pants. Everything fit like it had been worn for months and the fabric had memorized a body shape that was mine now but didn't feel like it yet. I hadn't worn a school uniform in years. The blazer sat too snug across the shoulders and the pants had that slightly too-high waist that Japanese school trousers always have.
I grabbed the bag from beside the desk. Textbooks I couldn't read yet, except my eyes understood the kanji somehow. My mouth was forming Japanese without me thinking about it too. Questions I put off because I had bigger ones. My feet found shoes by the front door. On the way out I passed a kitchen where a woman in an apron was humming over a cutting board. Issei's mother. She said something about breakfast and I said something back that sounded right, and she didn't look up, and I walked out the front door into morning sunlight.
Kuoh Town.
It looked like a town. Residential streets, neatly trimmed hedges, vending machines on corners. An old man was walking a small white dog across the intersection ahead of me. The dog stopped to pee against a light pole and the old man stood there patiently, looking at his phone. An ordinary morning in an ordinary Japanese suburb, and somewhere underneath all of it there was a system of magic circles and demonic contracts and territorial agreements between beings who could level city blocks.
The walk to school was about fifteen minutes. I knew the route from the anime, vaguely, and Issei's body knew it from muscle memory. My feet turned corners before I decided to, which was unsettling and didn't stop being unsettling no matter how many times it happened. Along the way I ran through what I knew and what I didn't. Raynare would approach in the next couple of days. The bridge where she'd stop me, the park, the church on the hill where Asia would be taken. I needed to find all of them and I needed to find them fast.
Ddraig hadn't spoken since the bedroom. I could still feel her, though. Listening.
The school gate appeared at the end of a tree-lined road, and Kuoh Academy looked exactly how a former all-girls school would look after being grudgingly converted to co-ed. Elegant buildings, manicured grounds, and an overwhelming wave of female students streaming through the gate. There were boys scattered in, outnumbered so badly it was almost comical.
"ISSEI!"
I turned. Two guys were speed-walking toward me from a side street, and I recognized them immediately.
Matsuda got to me first. Shaved head, athletic build, grinning like he'd discovered buried treasure. He was breathing hard from jogging. Behind him, Motohama pushed his glasses up with one finger and kept pace with the hurried precision of a man on a schedule.
"Dude," Matsuda said, falling into step beside me. "Dude. Did you see the kendo schedule? They moved practice to the morning slot. The morning slot, Issei. That means the locker room is occupied right now, as we speak, and if we cut through the-"
"Pass," I said.
Matsuda's mouth stayed open. No sound came out.
Motohama stopped walking. He adjusted his glasses. Then he adjusted them again. "Did you just say pass?"
"Yeah. I'm not in the mood."
They stared at me.
"You're not in the mood," Matsuda repeated slowly. "For the kendo locker room. For girls changing."
"I had a weird morning." I kept walking. "Go without me."
Matsuda looked at Motohama. Motohama looked at Matsuda.
"Who are you?" Matsuda said, and for a half-second the chill was real before his grin came back. He was joking. Mostly. "Who are you and what have you done with our Issei?"
I gave him a look that was probably too calm for the character I was supposed to be playing, because Matsuda's grin flickered. Then I shrugged. "Stomach hurts. Ate something bad. I'll owe you one."
That worked. Matsuda was already refocusing. "Your loss, man. Your absolute, devastating, once-in-a-lifetime loss." He slapped my shoulder and veered off toward the sports facilities, dragging Motohama by the sleeve. Motohama shot me one last look over his shoulder before they disappeared around a corner.
So that was the Perverted Trio without me. They were exactly who I thought they'd be, except louder, and Matsuda smelled like cheap body spray and gym socks, which the anime had mercifully left out.
I walked through the main gate and into the courtyard.
And stopped.
Rias Gremory was walking across the courtyard maybe thirty feet ahead of me.
I'd known she was beautiful. I'd watched her in HD, on my laptop, on my phone. I'd seen every frame of animation, every carefully drawn curve. I knew her measurements. The whole internet knew her measurements.
She was taller than I'd expected. Her legs were longer. The crimson hair caught the morning light and shifted between deep red and copper with every step, and her uniform fit her like it had been designed around her body rather than the other way around. She walked like she owned everything her shoes touched and didn't particularly care if anyone noticed.
Beside her, Akeno Himejima laughed at something, and the sound carried. Black hair tied with an orange ribbon, swinging with the laugh, almost to her waist. Her bust was absurd. Just flagrantly, unreasonably absurd. The uniform was doing its best and losing. Akeno moved with full knowledge of that fact and visible enjoyment of it.
They were real. They were real people. Voices and skin and weight and hair that caught the light because light is a real thing that hits real surfaces. The gap between what I'd expected and what I was seeing landed in my chest like a physical impact and sat there.
Rias turned toward me. Her path was going to bring her close, and I held still.
She walked past. Close enough that I caught her scent. Floral. Warm. A perfume or a shampoo or just her, layered underneath the spring air and the faint sweetness of the cherry blossoms dropping petals along the walkway. My pulse spiked. My skin prickled. Heat pooled low and involuntary, and Issei's body reacted before I had a say in it.
She didn't look at me. She had no reason to. I was Issei Hyoudou. One of the three most hated boys in school, a known pervert, a nobody. Her blue-green eyes swept the courtyard and passed over me like furniture.
That would change.
Ddraig was quiet. Pointedly, aggressively quiet. She'd felt what I'd felt. She'd noticed the spike.
She didn't comment. Worse.
I made myself start walking again and almost missed her. Koneko Toujou was on a bench near the old school building, a popsicle in one hand, her legs dangling because the bench was too tall for her. White hair, black cat-shaped hairclips, gold eyes in a face that looked like a doll someone had given the ability to judge you. Tiny. First-year tiny.
Those gold eyes were on me.
Still, patient, an attention so complete it looked like boredom. I knew why. Rias had assigned her to keep tabs on me, on the boy with the Longinus she wanted for her peerage. Koneko was the surveillance.
I met her eyes for half a second. She bit the popsicle. Looked away. Her expression didn't change at all.
I kept walking toward the school building, hands in my pockets. Girls laughing, shoes on concrete, someone's bag zipper catching the light. An ordinary morning at an ordinary school, and the only person who knew it was anything else was me. Me and the ancient dragon in my head who was already suspicious and probably going to be a problem.
A couple of days. That was what I had before Raynare found me on that bridge, before the smile and the fake name and the light spear through the chest. A couple of days to map the terrain, figure out a plan, and decide whether I was going to let the story play out or start rewriting it.
I looked up at the school building. Through one of the upper windows of the old building, I could just make out a shape. Red, catching light, there and gone. Rias, settling into the ORC clubroom.
Yeah. I was going to rewrite it.