Ch.5
"Ne, Issei-kun." Yuuma tilted her head. The sunset was behind her, and the smile on her face was the same one she'd been wearing all day, sweet and utterly hollow. "I had such a wonderful time today. So I want to ask you something."
She stepped closer. The fountain splashed behind her. The park was empty. The stuffed cat was still tucked under her arm.
"For my sake," she said, and her voice dropped out of the Yuuma register into a lower pitch that belonged to a different woman entirely, "would you die?"
I looked at her. The violet eyes had dropped the act. The mouth that had eaten my crepe an hour ago was set in a line that had murder in it. The wristband was still on her wrist. The stuffed cat was still under her arm.
"No," I said.
Her eyes went wide.
The transformation was faster than the anime made it look. Her body shifted, grew, filled out in ways that would have been fascinating under different circumstances. Her hair lengthened. Black feathered wings ripped through the back of her sundress and spread wide, catching the red light. The sweet schoolgirl clothes tore away and what was underneath was black leather straps and skin and the body of a woman who'd been alive longer than any human civilization. Her eyes went from violet to flat black-violet, and the warmth in them was gone.
The stuffed cat hit the cobblestones.
"That," Raynare said, and her voice was deeper now, harder, resonant with power that vibrated in my teeth, "was not the answer I was expecting."
A spear of light condensed in her right hand. White-hot, crackling, throwing shadows that moved wrong.
"MOVE!"
Ddraig screamed it a half-second before the throw. I was already dropping, throwing myself sideways, and the light spear punched through the air where my chest had been and shattered against the fountain behind me. Water erupted. Stone cracked. The heat of the near-miss washed across my face and left my skin stinging.
I hit the cobblestones on my shoulder and rolled. My left arm was on fire. Different from the channeling burn. This was the Sacred Gear waking up.
It erupted.
Red metal crawled up from my wrist, spreading over my hand, my fingers, my forearm, locking into place with a sound like armor being forged in real time. A gauntlet. Red as blood, with two golden spikes along the knuckles and a green jewel on the back that pulsed with light so bright it threw my shadow twenty feet across the park.
[BOOST!]
Ddraig's voice boomed. It filled the air, my skull, the ground under my knees. The jewel flashed green and my body doubled. Every muscle went tight at once. My vision sharpened until I could count the individual feathers on Raynare's wings from twenty feet away. My heartbeat steadied into a heavy, even rhythm that shook my ribs from inside. I was on my feet before I knew I'd stood up, and the world had gone slow around me, or I'd gone fast inside it.
Raynare had frozen. Her second light spear was half-formed in her hand and she was staring at the gauntlet on my arm, mouth open, eyes locked on the green jewel.
"That's not a Twice Critical," she said. Her wings beat once, lifting her back a step. "That's- you're-"
I didn't wait for her to finish the sentence. I closed the distance in three steps, faster than I'd ever moved, and threw a punch at her midsection.
She dodged it. My fist caught air where her stomach had been and she was above me, wings driving her up, a light spear already forming in each hand. I'd never thrown a real punch in this body and it showed. The form was wrong, the follow-through was off, and she was airborne now with the advantage.
The first spear came straight down. I got my gauntlet up and the impact ran up my arm to the shoulder, rattling my teeth. The spear shattered against the red metal. The second followed immediately, thrown from a different angle, and I couldn't block both.
The light spear grazed my right side, just under the ribs.
The pain was unreal. Holy light on human skin that had been conditioned for Sacred Gear compatibility, and my body lit up with agony from hip to shoulder like someone had dragged a white-hot wire across my torso. I staggered. My vision went white at the edges. My right hand went to the wound and came back wet and red.
Raynare landed in front of me, wings spread, both hands glowing with new spears. She was breathing hard. Her eyes were locked on the gauntlet.
"A Longinus," she said. "The Boosted Gear. You're the Red Dragon Emperor."
I pressed my hand against the wound. Blood was soaking through my shirt. The Boost was draining. The doubled strength was ebbing out of my muscles with every heartbeat, and I had seconds before I was back to human baseline with a gash across my ribs and a Fallen Angel who could throw light like javelins.
She formed two more spears. Raised them. I read her shoulders and moved before she threw.
She was faster. The first spear went wide because I was already diving. The second caught my sleeve and tore through the fabric without touching skin. I hit the ground, rolled, and came up running toward her.
She wasn't expecting that. She was a ranged fighter, light spears and distance, and I was closing instead of retreating. I got inside her reach before the next spears formed. My gauntleted hand closed around her left wrist and I pulled her down to my level.
For a second we were face to face. My grip on her wrist. Her wings half-spread behind her, pinned by the angle. The green jewel pulsing against her skin. Her pulse was hammering under the gauntlet, through the metal, into my fingers. Fast and hard and unsteady.
She was staring at me. Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. She wasn't looking at the gauntlet anymore. She was looking at my face.
I leaned in. Close enough that my mouth was next to her ear.
"You enjoyed today," I said. "That wasn't fake."
She flinched. Full-body, a jolt that ran from her wrist up through her shoulders and into her wings. Her mouth opened. Her jaw tightened. For a second I thought she was going to drive a light spear through my stomach from point-blank range.
Then she yanked her wrist free, beat her wings once, and was gone. Up, fast, into the red sky, black feathers scattering behind her. She didn't look back. She flew until she was a silhouette against the sunset, and then she was gone entirely.
I stood there for about two seconds. Then my legs gave out.
I went down on one knee next to the fountain. The cobblestones were cold through my pants. Blood was dripping from the gash in my right side, running over my fingers, pooling on the stone. The gauntlet was still on my arm, pulsing dim green, warm metal against my skin. Across the park, a streetlight flickered on, automatic, responding to the dusk that had settled while I was busy not dying.
Ddraig's voice came quiet, tired, the booming combat projection gone.
"You survived. Barely."
"Barely counts," I said. My voice sounded wrong. Thin. My left arm was shaking inside the gauntlet, a deep muscular tremor that wouldn't stop. The wound in my side was pulsing with my heartbeat, each pulse sending a fresh wave of heat up through my ribs.
"Your Boost expired four seconds before you reached her. That last grab was human-baseline strength. She let you hold on."
I thought about that. About Raynare, full Fallen Angel, letting a human boy with a bleeding torso hold her wrist while he whispered in her ear. She could have killed me ten times in those seconds.
"Yeah," I said. "I know."
"Why did she not?"
I didn't have an answer for that. Or I did, but the answer made things more complicated, and right now I was focused on not passing out. The cobblestones were cold under my knee. The broken fountain was gurgling, water flowing into the cracks between the stones and pooling around the base. A black feather drifted past me on the breeze and settled in the puddle.
The cobblestones behind me lit up crimson.
A magic circle. Glowing symbols I recognized from the anime, Gremory clan sigils rotating in concentric rings, blood-red light pouring out of the lines. The air smelled like ozone and flowers, the same scent I'd caught walking past a girl in a school courtyard.
Rias Gremory materialized in the circle. Nightgown. Bare feet on cold stone. Crimson hair loose around her shoulders, catching the last traces of sunset. She'd come straight from wherever she'd been, no preparation, no combat outfit. Koneko must have sent the signal the moment the wings came out.
She took two steps forward and stopped. Her eyes moved from the blood on the cobblestones to the gauntlet on my arm, still glowing. To the scattered black feathers. To the cracked fountain.
She'd come to resurrect a corpse. I'd watched the episode. The Evil Pieces were probably in her pocket right now, eight Pawn pieces, the same ones that were supposed to bring Issei Hyoudou back from the dead and bind him to her peerage. She'd done the math and positioned herself and waited for the kill.
Instead she was looking at a boy who was kneeling and bleeding and very much alive. With a Longinus on his arm and a Fallen Angel who'd chosen to flee.
I got to my feet. Slowly. My side screamed at me for it, and the world tilted for a second before leveling out. But I stood. I was going to be standing when she looked at me.
"You're Rias Gremory," I said.
Her eyes went sharp. Blue-green and focused and suddenly very, very present. "You know my name."
"I know a lot of things." I pressed my hand harder against the wound. "But right now I'd settle for a bandage."
She stared at me. The magic circle faded behind her. The park was dark, the sunset gone, the fountain broken and leaking. A moth was batting against the streetlight that had come on, small and frantic, throwing its own shadow across the cobblestones.
Then Rias Gremory, heiress of the House of Gremory, took off the light jacket she was wearing over her nightgown and knelt down next to me on the bloody cobblestones. Her bare knees hit the wet stone and she didn't flinch. She pressed the fabric against my wound without a word, and her fingers found the edges of the gash with a precision that said she'd done first aid before.
Her hands were warm. Her hair smelled like the courtyard.
"We need to talk," she said.
"Yeah," I said. "We do."
The green jewel on my gauntlet pulsed once, softly, and went dark.