When he came to his senses, Kai was standing at a podium.
"This is a transfer student joining our class today. Go ahead and introduce yourself."
Beside him stood a heavyset, balding teacher. Below, rows of students watched from their seats. Kai's expression was faintly dazed.
Just moments ago, he had pushed a little girl out of the path of an oncoming car. He vaguely remembered the shriek of brakes, then a warm, radiant light swallowing him whole.
And then—he was standing here.
Scanning the room full of curious eyes, Kai couldn't help but let his mind wander.
Was this heaven?
After saving a child's life, ascending to heaven seemed like a reasonable outcome, didn't it?
"I expected angels," Kai murmured, a hint of emotion bleeding into his voice.
He was still reeling from the sudden realization that he had died, and the feeling was difficult to name.
The teacher and students blinked at him. Someone stifled a laugh. "Hey, man—still sleepwalking?"
The laughter pulled Kai back to earth. He took a quiet breath and considered his situation.
His consciousness existed. That much was certain. Whether this counted as reincarnation or something else entirely, he had no way to know—it was, after all, his first time dying. He had no frame of reference.
No matter. He was here. He might as well make the best of it.
Kai looked out at the class and, out of long habit, arranged his expression into the practiced, easy smile he'd spent years refining.
"My name is Kai. It's a pleasure to meet you all."
A perfectly plain self-introduction.
The class collectively lost interest. A few girls lingered on his face a moment longer than the rest, but everyone else had already looked away. Just another new kid.
"Alright, Kai—take the empty seat in the back row, by the window."
The teacher adjusted his glasses, picked up a piece of chalk, and moved on. "Everyone, open your textbooks to page fifty-two."
Kai kept his smile as he walked to his seat. The moment he sat down, the smile faded. His entire demeanor went quiet and still.
He slipped his bag into the desk drawer and began taking stock of what was in his pockets.
A phone. A student ID. Two keys. A small handful of banknotes.
He examined the cash first. He didn't recognize the currency, but the total came to one thousand three hundred and fifty, in fifty-unit coins. The purchasing power of "over a thousand" didn't feel like much—somewhere in the ballpark of Japanese yen, perhaps.
He angled the phone screen toward his face and used the reflection to check his appearance. He gave a small nod.
Good. His face was just as handsome as he remembered.
He unlocked the phone with his fingerprint. The wallpaper was a photo of someone on a bicycle, head tilted back, grinning broadly at the sky.
Kai stared at the photo for a moment.
…He would never smile like that.
He shook his head slightly and changed the wallpaper without ceremony.
The student ID read Kuoh Academy, Second Year, Class 1. It also listed a home address—that explained the two keys.
So his soul had transferred into someone else's body in an entirely different world. That seemed to be the shape of things.
So, there really was something after death.
Kai's eyes went distant for a moment. Then he let out a quiet breath and filed the thought away for later.
All things considered, this wasn't a bad outcome. A fresh start, at the very least.
Just then, he caught movement from the corner of his eye—two people were watching him. He turned his head and found that yes, two exceptionally beautiful girls were indeed looking his way.
The girl on the left had long, fiery red hair and clear, sharp eyes. She carried herself with a cool, self-possessed maturity, and there was something magnetic about her—the kind of presence that made it difficult to look away.
The girl beside her had her black hair pulled into a high ponytail. Her face was softer, her smile warm and unhurried, giving off an impression of quiet gentleness.
Her beauty was perhaps a shade less striking than the redhead's, but only just—and her figure, by contrast, was even more impressive. The two were beautiful in entirely different ways.
Kai held their gaze for two seconds, then looked away.
Two very attractive girls. Probably just curious about the new transfer student.
He filed that away as well and thought nothing more of it.
What he didn't know was that Rias Gremory and Akeno Himejima had been watching him very carefully ever since he walked in.
Both of them had sensed it—something immense, sleeping inside him. A dormant power so vast it put even two High-class Devils on edge.
A Sacred Gear. It had to be. There was no other explanation.
Rias and Akeno exchanged a brief glance, then looked away in perfect unison, as though nothing had happened at all.
The school day dragged by and finally ended. Kai stopped by the security office, told them he couldn't find his bicycle, and tracked it down through the surveillance footage before riding home.
He let himself in to find a modestly cluttered apartment waiting for him.
His gaze went immediately to the memorial shelf on the wall, where the framed portraits of a middle-aged couple had been placed.
From a brief conversation with his homeroom teacher earlier, he'd learned that the previous owner of this body had lost his parents to a traffic accident.
Struck by a truck. Another pair of parents gone. He stared at the portraits a moment longer. Noted.
He walked into the bedroom with a neutral expression. The room was sparse—a desk, a bed, a computer. His eyes landed on the wastebasket beside the desk, which was overflowing with crumpled tissues. One eyebrow climbed slightly.
He turned on the computer and, as he had half-expected, discovered a hidden folder containing well over a hundred videos. His mouth pressed into a thin line.
He clicked through a few titles—Forbidden Campus, The Young Widow, Night Shift at the Convenience Store—and grimaced.
His predecessor had quite the collection.
He closed everything out, cleaned up the room, and moved on to his workout. After working up a proper sweat and showering, he stretched out on the bed, bare-chested, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.
The day had been uneventful, all things considered.
A few boys had come over to introduce themselves. A few girls had drifted by with transparent excuses. He'd handled all of them with the same measured smile and kept each one at a comfortable arm's length.
School, the workplace, social gatherings—they were all the same underneath. These webs of small talk and surface-level obligation, the performance of belonging. Kai had little patience for any of it.
But you couldn't afford to stand too far outside the circle either.
Be too cold, too strange, too obviously other, and people start talking. That kind of friction was its own kind of trouble.
So he had made a habit of performing just enough warmth to pass. Sociable on the surface, unreachable underneath. Keep people close enough that they don't notice the distance.
He could keep living like that.
That was what he thought.
Until, two days later, he suddenly had a girlfriend.
More precisely: he was confessed to—out of nowhere, by a girl he had never spoken to in his life.
From the few things she said, Kai was fairly certain his predecessor hadn't known her either.
Her name was Yuma Amano. Sweet-faced, bright-eyed, with the kind of wholesome, approachable prettiness that made her easy to trust on sight.
She found him on a bridge in the amber light of late afternoon. Clutching the railing, she looked at him as though gathering every scrap of nerve she had, and said in a small, halting voice:
"Um—my name is Yuma Amano. I saw you at the school gate yesterday, and I… I was wondering if maybe you'd want to… try going out with me?"
She couldn't quite meet his eyes. Her cheeks had gone pink.
Kai had not expected to be confessed to.
For a brief, absurd moment, he entertained the thought: maybe the universe owed him one, and this was the payoff.
He was quietly amused—but he was not moved.
Love at first sight. Asking a complete stranger out on the basis of a single glance. Right.
Sure. And I've got a bridge to sell you.
Did pure, spontaneous love like that actually exist? He didn't buy it. Not for a second.
He kept his expression warm and open, but his thoughts were cold and clear.
A beautiful girl confessing to a stranger she'd seen exactly once—no. That didn't happen. Not without a reason.
So what was the reason?
He ran through the possibilities. He was, at present, entirely alone in the world—no family, no connections. What he did have was a three-hundred-square-meter house and a substantial life insurance payout from his parents' accident. North of forty million.
He supposed it could be something simpler, more personal. An ulterior motive of a different kind entirely.
If that's the case, he thought dryly, there's really no need for the theatrics.
Either way, he wanted to find out. So with the practiced expression of someone genuinely surprised and quietly pleased, he said yes.
And just like that, they were a couple.
"Tomorrow's a holiday—Kai, do you want to go shopping together?"
Yuma Amano's happiness was unguarded and immediate. Her eyes were bright, her expression caught somewhere between hopeful and coy.
"Sure," Kai said, voice easy and warm. "Looking forward to it. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Okay!!"
Her whole face lit up.
"Get home safe," he added, and reached out to gently brush a loose strand of hair from her face. The gesture was small, unhurried, natural.
The smile she gave him in return was radiant with shy joy. She left reluctantly, glancing back at him every few steps the way only someone truly smitten ever does—or pretends to.
Kai stood still and watched her go, his expression soft and steady.
The moment her figure disappeared around the corner, every trace of warmth drained from his face.
He stood there in silence for a few seconds, turning the encounter over in his mind, searching for the seam in her performance.
He didn't find one.
He exhaled through his nose, gave the empty street one last unreadable look, and turned to walk away.
Let's see what you're really after.
The moment he was gone, a small figure slipped out from the shadows—a girl with close-cropped white hair, petite but sharp-eyed. She watched the direction Kai had disappeared, then raised her phone to her ear. The screen read: President Rias.
"Hello, Koneko—did you find anything?" Rias's voice came through clearly.
"As you suspected, President," Koneko Toujou replied, her voice quiet and even. "The Fallen Angel is moving against him."
"Good work. Come on back."
Koneko lowered the phone. She stood there a moment longer, staring down the empty street.
Something about Kai's behavior was still nagging at her. She couldn't put her finger on exactly what.
She just knew that watching him had felt, somehow, unsettling.
The next morning, Kai was up early. He washed up, got dressed, and headed out for the date Yuma Amano had proposed.
He was halfway to the door when he stopped, turned around, and walked back to the kitchen counter.
He stood there for a moment, then picked up a small paring knife and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
He was aware that arming himself against a high school girl was, by any reasonable measure, excessive. But an unknown girl falling for him on sight and asking him out within twenty-four hours strained credulity to the breaking point, and Kai had learned to trust that instinct.
His working theory: a setup. Either a honey trap or some form of targeted harassment. Lead him somewhere quiet, then the accomplices appear—threats, blackmail, whatever the script called for.
He admitted, not without some self-awareness, that this was a fairly paranoid reading of the situation.
She was a high school girl. Worst case, she had a few delinquent friends in her corner.
And if he was wrong—if Yuma Amano turned out to be exactly what she appeared to be, a girl with a genuine and uncomplicated crush—then he would make it up to her. He would take it seriously. He wasn't unreasonable.
He pressed his lips together, got on his bicycle, and rode to the meeting spot.
From down the street, he could already see her—Yuma Amano, standing quietly on the corner, waiting.
He pulled up in front of her and arranged his face into a look of mild, apologetic embarrassment. "Sorry, Yuma. Did I keep you waiting?"
He had been late on purpose.
"Not at all! I just got here myself," she said immediately, her smile bright and unbothered. She stepped forward and looped her arm through his. "Let's go!"
"Ha—alright."
He smiled warmly and let the day begin.
They wandered through the mall, browsed clothing stores, and tried things on for each other. They ducked into one of those small photo booths and came out with a strip of sticker photos. He bought her a gift—a simple headband she'd admired—and they found a dessert shop nearby and split something sweet.
They laughed and talked. The afternoon moved easily. Kai smiled when he was supposed to smile, said the right things, and by all outward appearances was exactly the kind of attentive, good-natured companion anyone would want.
The sky deepened slowly from gold to amber to early dusk.
Eventually, they drifted away from the main streets and down a quieter path into a nearby park—sparsely lit, mostly empty.
In the middle of it stood a fountain. Yuma Amano stepped ahead of him, then turned around.
"Kai—to commemorate our first date, can I make one small request?"
She stood with her hands clasped behind her back, the picture of easy grace, smiling at him.
"Of course," he said.
His right hand had already found its way into his jacket pocket.
Something shifted in Yuma Amano's smile—subtle at first, then unmistakable. The sweetness curdled. What remained was something much colder.
"—Could you die for me?"
The warmth in Kai's expression locked up.
He took two quick steps back, his gaze going sharp. "What—"
She tilted her head, savoring it. "I said—could you please die, right now?"
The air around her split apart.
Her clothes vanished in an instant—a fleeting impression of pale skin before black fabric wrapped itself around her like armor answering a summons. And from her back, two great wings unfurled: dark feathers, wide and absolute, cutting the dim park light into shadows.
She raised one hand. A point of light gathered in her palm, cold and brilliant, spinning and sharpening until it resolved into a spear—crackling with lightning, electricity skittering down its shaft in bright, savage arcs.
Kai stared.
He stared at the wings. He stared at the spear. He stared at the woman who had, twenty-four hours ago, been blushing on a bridge.
His hand closed around the paring knife in his pocket.
He was painfully, acutely aware of how small it was.
…Okay.
What in the hell.
Whatever he had been prepared for—delinquents, a camera crew, a poorly executed prank—it had not been this. It had not been black wings and a lightning spear and whatever kind of creature was currently smiling at him from behind Yuma Amano's face.
What kind of world is this?