Ch.11
My fist hit her in the chest.
Three Boosts. Eight times baseline. The gauntlet connected just below her collarbone and I felt the impact travel through the metal, through my bones, up my forearm to the elbow. Raynare's wings folded around her body, instinct moving before thought, and then the force carried her backward off her feet and she left the ground entirely. She hit the stone wall behind the altar hard enough that the candelabras on either side toppled, green flames guttering on the floor, and went through the partition in a spray of shattered masonry. She didn't get up immediately.
The green light went wrong.
The tendrils connecting Raynare to Asia snapped like threads cut with scissors, all at once, and the glow that had been pulling away from Asia's hands reversed direction. Twilight Healing surged back into her fingers with a flash that lit the basement brighter than the ritual candles. The rings that had been forming around Raynare's middle fingers dissolved into green mist and were gone.
Asia's head dropped. Her body went limp against the cross, held up only by the light-restraints at her wrists. Unconscious. But her chest was moving. Shallow, fast breaths visible from ten feet away.
Alive.
I stood in the center of the ritual circle with the symbols dying around my feet and my arm shaking inside the gauntlet. The tremor started in my forearm where the metal ended and went all the way to my shoulder in pulses I couldn't stop or slow down. Three Boosts had pushed the Sacred Gear past whatever wall Ddraig had warned me about. The metal was still hot against my skin, a deep, burrowing heat that wasn't fading, and inside the gauntlet my knuckles were wet. I didn't check whether it was sweat or blood.
"The ritual is broken. The girl's Sacred Gear has re-bonded."
"Asia-"
"Unconscious. Vitals are stable. The extraction was interrupted before the soul-anchor severed. She is intact."
I moved toward the cross. My legs were steady enough, which was the only thing working in my favor, because my left arm wasn't going to be doing anything useful for a while. The light-restraints around Asia's wrists flickered and dissolved as the ritual circle died underneath them, and I caught her before she slid to the floor.
Small. She was so small. Her blonde hair fell across my arm, and her nun's habit was torn at the shoulder, and when I lowered her to the stone at the base of the altar her head lolled to one side. Her hands twitched. The faintest green glow pulsed around her middle fingers, Twilight Healing, resettled, home. Her breathing steadied by a fraction.
I set her down. Leaned her against the altar base. Stepped back.
Movement.
I turned. Raynare was pulling herself out of the wall. One hand on the cracked stone, the other pressing against her ribs where I'd hit her. Her wings were folded tight against her back, feathers bent at wrong angles. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth to her chin and dripped onto the black leather of her outfit. She found me across the basement and her jaw was clenched so hard the muscles in her neck stood out, but her eyes were wide and her mouth kept almost opening and then pressing shut.
She raised her hand. A light spear formed. Smaller than the ones she'd thrown before, shaky, the light flickering at the tip.
A heel clicked on stone to my left.
A woman stepped out from behind a pillar. Tall. The tallest woman I'd seen in this world. Long navy-blue hair covering her right eye, the rest falling loose past her shoulders. Maroon trenchcoat, gold necklace, and she was holding a light spear in each hand, steady and bright and aimed at me. Her uncovered eye was brown and flat and looking at me like I was a math problem she was solving in her head.
Kalawarner. I'd seen her in the anime. Maybe two lines of dialogue across the whole series.
To my right, the shadows between two fallen candelabras shifted and a smaller figure stepped out. "Oh, you broke her." Blonde twintails, gothic-lolita frills, pink light spear crackling between her hands. Mittelt was grinning with her fangs showing. "Look at Raynare-sama. She's a mess."
Three Fallen Angels. Three light spears. My left arm was shaking badly enough that the gauntlet was rattling against itself, and Asia was unconscious behind me, and I was standing in a dead ritual circle with a shoulder wound still leaking through my shirt and a hip burn that pulsed with every heartbeat and zero Boosts left in the tank.
"The Red Dragon Emperor." Kalawarner's voice was low and cool. "You interrupted our operation."
Raynare's light spear wavered. The blood on her chin was dripping onto the floor. She was looking at me, not at the others.
"Kill him," Raynare said. Her voice was steady. Her spear wasn't. "Kill him and finish the-"
The wall behind her exploded.
Crimson light. A wave of energy that vaporized the stone partition, sending fragments outward in a spray that cracked off the far walls. The heat washed across my face, and the air tasted like ozone and flowers, and I knew who it was before the dust cleared because I'd been smelling that combination since a girl in a nightgown knelt next to me on bloody cobblestones.
Rias walked through the gap she'd made. Crimson hair loose, crimson aura coiling around both hands. The Power of Destruction was dark red with black edges that swallowed light, and it moved like it was alive, curling and flexing around her fingers. She was wearing her school uniform, blazer hanging open, and her eyes were blue-green and cold and furious.
Behind her, Akeno. Shrine-maiden red and white, hair loose, a sphere of yellow lightning crackling between her palms. She was smiling. Gentle, and the gentle part was doing a lot of work.
And behind Akeno, Koneko. Gold eyes. Bruised knuckles. A spatter of someone else's blood on her left sleeve that she hadn't bothered to wipe off.
Kalawarner's light spears dimmed. Mittelt's grin vanished. Raynare's spear flickered and died in her hand, and her whole body pulled inward, wings tight against her back, chin tucked, shoulders dropping. She looked at Rias's hands and her face went blank in a way that wasn't composure. It was the blankness that comes when you stop bothering to hide how scared you are.
Rias stopped. Her eyes swept the room. Asia at the altar base. Me in the dead ritual circle. Raynare bleeding against the wall. The other two flanking. She took it in, and when her gaze landed back on Raynare, the Power of Destruction flared bright enough to throw shadows across the basement that bent in directions shadows shouldn't go.
"You operated on Gremory territory without authorization." Rias's voice was level, the commanding register, the heiress who'd been running a war peerage since she was a teenager. "You kidnapped a Sacred Gear wielder. You attempted a forbidden extraction ritual. You attacked an ally of the Gremory household."
She raised her right hand. The crimson energy condensed into a tight sphere that hummed at a frequency I could feel in my teeth.
"The penalty for any one of those is death."
Kalawarner dropped her spears. They hit the stone floor and fizzled out and she stepped back with both hands up, palms out. Mittelt followed a half-second later, her pink spear winking out, eyes wide, jaw rigid. Her lower lip was trembling.
Raynare didn't move. Still against the wall, hand on her ribs. She was staring at Rias's raised hand, and on her face was the blankness again, absolute and total.
In canon, this was where she died.
I'd watched it. Rias obliterated Raynare without a second's hesitation. Black feathers rained through the church. The betrayer erased by the princess. Clean, final, the definitive end of the girl who'd murdered Issei Hyoudou on their first date. Canon Issei had stood there and let it happen because he'd been broken by a dead girl in his arms and the wristband trick had cured him of any softness for Raynare. He'd watched and said nothing.
I was not canon Issei. And Asia was breathing behind me.
Rias's arm pulled back. The sphere of destruction brightened. Akeno's lightning crackled louder. Koneko shifted her weight forward.
I moved.
I stepped between Rias and Raynare. Put my back to the Fallen Angel, my face to Rias, my body directly in the path of an attack that would disintegrate me and everything behind me down to the molecular level.
The room went silent.
Rias's hand stayed raised. The Power of Destruction hovered above her palm, still humming. Her arm had stopped mid-motion. Her mouth was open a fraction, and for a second the heiress was gone and there was just a girl staring at a boy who'd done the last thing she'd expected.
"What are you doing?" Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to.
"She's mine to deal with."
Rias stared at me. Her jaw tightened. Her eyes moved from my face to Raynare behind me and back, running the calculation. The boy who'd been stabbed by this woman. The boy who'd bled on fountain cobblestones while she knelt next to him in a nightgown. The boy who'd negotiated his independence across her desk and pressed his finger against hers while doing it. Standing between her killing blow and the woman who'd tried to kill him.
"She attempted to murder you." Slow, careful, the tone of explaining why fire is hot. "She kidnapped your friend. She was extracting a Sacred Gear that would have left a girl dead on a cross. And you're protecting her."
"I'm not protecting her. I'm claiming her."
Behind me, Raynare made a sound. Small. Involuntary. I didn't turn around.
Akeno's lightning had gone quiet. Her eyes were moving between me and Rias with focused attention. Koneko hadn't moved at all.
"Claiming her," Rias repeated.
"All three of them." I looked at Kalawarner, standing rigid with her hands up. At Mittelt, whose eyes were darting between me and a wall that might once have had a back exit before Rias had blown half of it inward. "They're done. You won. They know it. Killing them gains nothing. They're low-rank Fallen Angels running a rogue operation without Grigori authorization. Nobody in the Grigori command structure is going to miss them. Nobody is coming to avenge them."
"Then there's no political cost to eliminating them."
"There's a cost to you."
Her eyes narrowed. "What cost?"
"You kill three surrendered enemies in front of a nun who heals people for a living." I tilted my head toward Asia, unconscious at the altar's base. "She wakes up and finds out her saviors executed prisoners while she was out. How does that land?"
Rias's mouth opened. Closed. Her jaw worked.
"That's not why you're doing this."
"No. It's not."
The quiet stretched. Behind me Raynare was breathing, shallow and fast. Kalawarner hadn't moved. Mittelt had stopped darting her eyes and was staring at me.
I turned around.
Raynare was against the wall. One hand on her ribs, one at her side. Wings tight, feathers pressed flat. Blood drying on her chin. Her violet eyes were locked on mine and her jaw was still set hard.
The girl who'd caught a stuffed cat and laughed before she could stop herself. The woman whose lip I'd wiped cream from with my thumb while she froze and stared at me. The Fallen Angel who'd let me hold her wrist at the fountain when she could have put a light spear through my chest for it. All of them were in there, behind the blood and the leather and the bent feathers, and none of them was the whole picture.
I held out my right hand. Palm open.
"You're coming with me."
Her eyes went to my hand. To my face. To the gauntlet on my left arm, the green jewel dim. To Rias behind me, still holding destruction above her palm. Back to the hand.
"Why?" Her voice cracked on the word.
I took her wrist.
Left wrist. The same one. The one I'd grabbed at the fountain with a gauntleted hand while she was full Fallen Angel and could have ended me before the next heartbeat. The same wrist she'd yanked free before flying into the sunset and scattering black feathers behind her.
She flinched. Full-body, her wings snapping half-open, her free hand coming up with light flickering at the fingertips. I didn't let go. My grip was firm. My fingers around her wrist where the leather left bare skin.
Her pulse hammered against my palm. Fast and hard and ragged. The same rhythm I'd felt through the gauntlet's metal at the fountain, except this time there was no barrier between us. Skin on skin. Her hand was shaking. Her whole arm was shaking. She was staring at my fingers on her wrist and her mouth was open and her eyes were wet and she wasn't doing a single thing about either.
She didn't pull away.
The light at her fingertips died. Her free hand dropped to her side. She stood there, held by my grip and by whatever was behind her eyes that she couldn't name, and she didn't pull away.
I looked at Kalawarner.
"You too."
The tall woman stared at me. Her uncovered eye moved from my face to Rias to Raynare's wrist in my hand. She was quiet long enough that water dripping from a cracked pipe somewhere above us became the loudest sound in the room.
Then she lowered her arms and folded them across her chest.
"And if I refuse?"
"Then the girl with the crimson hair does what she came here to do."
Kalawarner looked at Rias. At the Power of Destruction. At Akeno's smile. At Koneko, who was cracking a knuckle without any particular hurry.
"Fine," Kalawarner said. Her voice was flat. "Fine."
Mittelt lasted about two more seconds. Her chin crumpled and her eyes went wide and wet and she hugged her own arms and said, "I don't want to die," in a voice so small it barely carried across the basement.
I looked at Rias.
She was still holding the sphere. Her arm hadn't dropped. Her eyes were on me, blue-green and burning. Her jaw was tight and her nostrils were flared and she was breathing hard through her nose, holding it in. But her eyes were slightly wider than the anger accounted for, and her hand with the sphere had started to lower before she caught herself and pulled it back up. She was looking at me differently. I couldn't have said how. But she was.
"You're going to regret this," she said.
"Probably."
"They will betray you the moment they see an opening."
"Probably that too."
"You are an idiot."
"You already knew that."
Her mouth twitched. The Power of Destruction flickered. Dimmed. Dissolved into red motes that scattered and faded, and her hand came down to her side, and the basement went dark.
"They're your responsibility," she said. "Every one of them. If they cause trouble in my territory, it falls on you."
"Understood."
"This is the second time you've refused to let me kill something that was trying to kill you."
"I'll try to make it a habit."
Her jaw tightened. Her eyes held mine for a beat longer than the conversation needed. Then she turned, crimson hair swinging, and walked toward the gap she'd blown in the wall. Akeno followed, the lightning fading from her hands, and shot me a look over her shoulder that I couldn't read and didn't try to.
Koneko walked past me. Paused. Looked at Raynare. Looked at me.
"…Weird," she said.
Then she followed the others out.
I stood in the basement of a ruined church that smelled like ozone and burnt stone and old copper. Broken ritual circle under my feet. Unconscious nun behind me. Fallen Angel's wrist still in my hand. My left arm was trembling in the gauntlet. My shoulder was leaking fresh blood through my shirt where Freed's light sword had bitten deep. The hip wound pulsed with my heartbeat. There was a spider in the upper corner of the room, sitting in the center of a web strung between two stone blocks. It hadn't moved through any of this.
I looked at Raynare.
Her violet eyes were wet. She blinked, hard, once, and they weren't.
"What's your real name?" I asked.
Her mouth tightened. "You know my name."
"I know Raynare. I'm asking the one underneath."
She stared at me. The pulse under my fingers was still going fast. Her lips parted, closed, parted again. The blood on her chin had dried to a dark line.
"Raynare," she said, finally. Quiet. "It's just Raynare."
I held her wrist for a second longer. Then I let go.
She stayed.