Ch.3
I'd been walking the bridge route for ten minutes, going slow, stopping at the same vending machine I'd passed yesterday to buy a can of coffee I didn't want, when I saw her.
She was standing at the far end of the pedestrian overpass, hands clasped in front of her skirt, fidgeting with her fingers. Long black hair past her hips, violet eyes, a school uniform I didn't recognize. A different academy. She was pretty in the obvious way that's supposed to disarm you, all soft features and shy body language and that particular tilt of the head that says I'm-harmless-please-like-me.
Yuuma Amano. Also known as Raynare. Fallen Angel. The woman who, in every version of this story I'd ever watched, killed Issei Hyoudou at a fountain while smiling.
She was watching the students leaving school, scanning faces like she was looking for someone specific. When her eyes landed on me, she straightened up. Brightened. Put on the sweetest, most rehearsed blush I'd ever seen.
I kept walking toward her because that was the plan. My heart rate was steady. My hands were in my pockets and they stayed there. The can of coffee was cold against my palm. Behind me, the after-school crowd thinned out. Nobody from the Perverted Trio was with me. Nobody would witness this.
A sparrow landed on the chain-link fence rail beside me and hopped twice before taking off again.
"Um- excuse me!"
I stopped. Looked at her. Took a beat, because that's what a normal guy does when a pretty girl he's never met calls out to him on a bridge.
"Yeah?"
"Are you- are you Hyoudou Issei-kun? From Kuoh Academy?"
"That's me."
She stepped closer. The blush deepened. Her fingers twisted in front of her skirt, and she dropped her chin so she was looking up at me through her lashes. The whole performance was polished. She'd done this before, or at least practiced it enough to make it look natural to a teenage boy who'd never had a girl speak to him voluntarily.
I wasn't that teenage boy. But she didn't know that.
"I- I've seen you walking home a few times, and I- I just-" She took a breath. Steadied herself. "W-Will you go out with me?"
In the anime, Issei had screamed. Blubbered. Probably cried. The original soul in this body would have tripped over his own shoes trying to say yes fast enough, and Raynare would have filed him under easy-target and moved on with her evening.
I smiled. Just a small one. "Sure."
She blinked. The blush was still on her face but her eyes went flat for a fraction of a second before the act came back. That wasn't what she'd expected. I'd watched enough of the show to know what she was seeing right now: a boy who should have been a stammering mess, standing there with his hands still in his pockets, smiling like someone had offered him a cup of coffee instead of a date.
"R-Really? Just like that?"
"You just asked me out. Seemed rude to make you wait for an answer." I pulled one hand out of my pocket and extended it. "Issei. But you already knew that."
She took my hand. Her fingers were warm. Small, slim, with a grip that was softer than it needed to be because she was playing fragile. Her perfume reached me at the same moment, close and clear now that she was within arm's length. Lavender. And underneath it, lower, darker, an edge that didn't belong to any perfume counter I'd ever visited. Her skin smelled like ozone before a storm.
My pulse ticked up. Just a notch, visible in my own wrist where my fingers were wrapped around hers.
She was beautiful. She was going to try to kill me.
"I'm Amano Yuuma," she said, and the smile she gave me was radiant and completely false. "It's nice to meet you, Issei-kun."
"Yuuma." I let the name sit in my mouth for a second. Evening sun. Field of heaven. The writers hadn't been subtle. "That's a pretty name. How about this Saturday? I'll pick the spot."
Her eyes flickered. Just for a second, the calculation behind them showed through the act. I was supposed to be the one scrambling, not suggesting logistics. She recovered fast, though. The blush came back, the shy smile, the whole package.
"Saturday sounds perfect!"
"I'll meet you at the fountain park at ten. The one downtown."
"Okay!" She was already pulling her hand back, fingers sliding out of mine. She gave a little wave. "I'll see you then, Issei-kun!"
She turned and walked away down the bridge, hair swinging behind her. Her stride was light, bouncy, every step calibrated to look like a girl walking on air after landing a date. I watched her until she turned the corner at the far end of the overpass and disappeared behind a hedgerow.
My hands were steady. My breathing was normal. The can of coffee in my left hand was still cold and I cracked it open and took a drink. It was Boss Black, the unsweetened kind, and it tasted like burnt metal. I drank it anyway.
I started walking home. The sun was getting low and the shadows of the buildings were stretching across the street in long bars. A delivery truck was blocking half the road ahead of me, and the driver was arguing with someone on his phone about an address. I stepped around him.
Ddraig had been silent the entire encounter. Through the introduction, the handshake, the date arrangement, all of it. Her attention had been there the whole time, focused and intense, but she hadn't said a word.
She waited until I was two blocks from the bridge.
"That girl is not human."
Ddraig's voice was quiet. None of the force she'd put into it during the channeling sessions. This was just a statement, delivered like a weather report.
"I know," I said.
A long pause. She was processing.
"You are going anyway."
"I am."
Another pause. Longer.
"…Interesting."
I passed a convenience store with a cat sitting in the window display, wedged between two stacks of instant ramen. The cat was orange and had one ear that was bent sideways. It watched me walk past with the focused disinterest that only cats manage.
Halfway home, I looked up. The rooftops along the shopping street were all flat, low-rise, lined with AC units and satellite dishes. On the third building from the corner, a small white-haired figure was sitting on the edge with her legs dangling, eating what looked like a chocolate bar. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the spot on the bridge where Raynare had been standing.
Koneko. Still on surveillance duty, posted up there with her chocolate and her blank expression like she did this every afternoon. If she'd seen the encounter, Rias would know about it by tonight. Rias would know the perverted boy with the potential Sacred Gear had just been asked out by a girl from another school, and Rias would file that away in whatever strategic calculus she was running.
I didn't look up again. I didn't acknowledge Koneko. I just kept walking, finished the coffee, and tossed the can into a recycling bin that was already overflowing.
At home, dinner was curry. Issei's mother asked who the girl was. I stared at her.
"What girl?"
"The neighbors said they saw you talking to a pretty girl on the bridge." She was smiling. His father looked up from the newspaper with raised eyebrows.
"Just someone from another school," I said. "She asked for directions."
"Directions." His mother's smile didn't change. "To where?"
"The train station."
"The train station is two blocks from school. Everyone knows where it is."
"She was new in town."
His mother went back to the curry. She was still smiling. His father went back to the newspaper. Neither of them asked a follow-up question, which was somehow worse than if they had.
After dinner, I locked myself in the bedroom.
I sat on the bed. Left sleeve up. Same position as last night.
"Round two," I said.
Ddraig stirred. "You said the moment is coming soon. How soon?"
"Saturday."
"Three days."
"Yeah."
"Then we push harder tonight. I will not hold back as much. It will hurt more."
"Good."
She didn't waste time. Her voice dropped into that close, coaching register from the night before, right against the inside of my ear, warm and focused entirely on guiding the energy. I extended my arm, closed my eyes, and breathed.
The heat came faster this time. My forearm was burning within seconds, and the individual channels of dragon energy lit up like wires being overloaded. I locked my jaw. My teeth creaked. The green glow came, brighter than before, pulsing behind my eyelids even with my eyes shut.
One second. The heat was savage, running up past my elbow now, into my shoulder. My left hand was shaking.
"Hold."
Two seconds. My fingers went rigid, spread wide, and the green light was leaking between them and I could see it through my eyelids, a sick nuclear glow that had no business coming from human skin.
Then my arm gave out. I fell back on the bed, gasping. My entire left side was tingling, shoulder to hip, and my left hand was clenched into a fist I couldn't open.
"Two seconds," Ddraig said. Her voice was back to its normal spread, filling my skull evenly. She sounded satisfied. Maybe even a little impressed. "Twice what your body managed last time. Your pathways are adapting faster than any host I have had."
"Feels like my arm is going to fall off."
"It will not. The sensation will fade. The pathways, however, will remain wider. Each session builds on the last. By Saturday, you may be able to hold three seconds."
"Three seconds going to save my life?"
"No. But it may give the Gear the opening it needs to manifest before you die rather than after."
Encouraging.
I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. My arm unclenched slowly, finger by finger. The tingling faded to a dull ache, then to a low-grade warmth that was almost comfortable.
"You are thinking," Ddraig said.
"Always."
"About what?"
I thought about it. The bridge. Yuuma's face. Those violet eyes going flat for half a second when I didn't react like she expected. The warm fingers. The lavender and ozone. Her walking away, swinging her hair like she'd already won.
"I'm thinking about how pretty she is when she's not trying to kill me."
Silence. A long one. Ddraig's presence sat heavy in my skull. She was working through what I'd just said, and she hadn't landed on an answer yet.
"…You are the strangest host I have ever had."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It was not one."
"I'll take it as one anyway."
She went quiet. I closed my eyes. My arm throbbed. Saturday was three days away. A beautiful Fallen Angel with a fake name and a light spear was counting down the same clock I was, and she thought she knew how it ended.
She didn't. But I couldn't afford to be wrong about that.
I rolled over, pulled the blanket up, and let Ddraig's warmth hum at the edge of sleep. The last thing I thought before I dropped off was that Yuuma's hand had been warmer than I expected, and that lavender really didn't suit a woman with black wings.