The sleeping beauty opened her eyes.
They were a deep, clear blue-green—vivid and luminous, the kind of eyes that caught you off guard and held you there for a moment longer than you intended. She blinked once, unhurried, and focused on Kai sitting up beside her.
"Is it morning already…?" she said, her voice still soft with sleep.
She pushed herself upright without any particular concern for what she was or wasn't wearing, stretched her arms above her head with the easy, unselfconscious grace of someone entirely at home in her own skin, and let out a small, contented yawn.
"Good morning."
"Good morning," Kai said.
The last thing he remembered before losing consciousness was the flash of red hair at the edge of his vision. He pulled his thoughts together and asked the most obvious question first.
"You saved me last night?"
Rias smiled. She drew one knee up toward her chest, rested her chin on it, and regarded him with a warm, proprietary sort of interest—the way someone looks at something they've decided is theirs.
"Of course. It was quite a bit of work, I'll have you know."
The smile settled into something more deliberate as she continued.
"My name is Rias Gremory. I'm a Devil—and I am your Master. I look forward to working with you, Kai."
"…A Devil." He repeated the word carefully. "Your Master."
He sat with that for a moment.
"Alright. Can you walk me through what actually happened? That woman with the wings—why did she go out of her way to kill me? We'd never even met."
Rias considered for a moment, then exhaled through her nose.
"It's a long story. The short version: the one who attacked you was a Fallen Angel. She made contact with you to confirm whether you possessed a Sacred Gear. Once she was certain you did, she moved to take it by killing you."
A Sacred Gear.
The sword. The shield. The column of light that had opened the earth and left nothing behind but black feathers.
"Why would something like that be inside me?" Kai asked.
"That, I genuinely don't know. Historically, people who carry Sacred Gears are rare—exceptional individuals, by most accounts. Perhaps consider it a gift." Rias tilted her head slightly. "An unusual one, granted."
Kai was quiet for a moment, turning it over. He thought about the fruit knife in his pocket, about his theory of honey traps and delinquents, about how thoroughly wrong he had been.
A Fallen Angel. I mistook a Fallen Angel for a common con artist.
He supposed, in fairness, that the error had been understandable. In a world where he'd had no reason to expect the supernatural to exist, it was not an unreasonable assumption. It was still embarrassing.
He set it aside.
"In any case—thank you, for saving me. But what exactly does 'Master' mean?"
His gaze drifted, involuntarily, for just a moment. Rias was still sitting on the bed with the same total indifference to the situation that she'd had since waking up, and her figure was—
He cleared his throat and looked at the wall.
This was, technically speaking, the first real conversation he had ever had with this woman. The circumstances surrounding it were something a reasonable person would need a moment to adjust to.
Rias caught the flicker in his expression and smiled—a satisfied, slightly knowing smile.
"It means exactly what it sounds like," she said, making no move to remedy the situation. "I am your Master. You were reborn as my Devil servant. Which means, incidentally, that you are now a Devil yourself."
She rose from the bed and came toward him, her smile edging into something playful. Standing fully, her presence was even more striking—there was a natural authority to the way she held herself that had nothing to do with the obvious.
"Why are you looking at the wall?" she asked, with the air of someone finding this genuinely amusing. "You can look. I don't mind."
Do Devils have no concept of embarrassment?
Kai supposed they probably didn't—or at least this one didn't—and revised his framework accordingly. In honesty, it was a surprisingly refreshing quality. He had little patience for affectation.
As for being a Devil: he found, on reflection, that he didn't object. After what a Fallen Angel had done to him, he had no particular goodwill toward the angelic persuasion anyway. If this was where he landed, he could work with it.
"Last night was purely for healing, then," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
Rias laughed—a genuine, bright sound. "Your human instincts are charming. But yes. I'll also tell you, for full transparency, that I am very much a virgin."
She said it in a low, conversational tone directly beside his ear, with a completely straight face, as though she were commenting on the weather.
Then she stepped away and began dressing with the same composure she'd had throughout, paying the audience no attention whatsoever.
Kai watched her for a moment, found himself without a suitable response, and gave up looking for one.
"Could you do my buttons?"
Rias turned her back toward him, gathered her long red hair and swept it forward over her shoulder, baring a clean expanse of pale back.
He raised an eyebrow, then stepped forward and fastened the row of buttons without ceremony, and then pulled on his own clothes.
Rias settled onto the edge of the bed and drew on a pair of short white socks, her manner perfectly relaxed, as though this were an ordinary morning.
"You'll come to school with me today. I'll introduce you to two of my other companions and get you settled into the club."
"Fine."
After everything he'd witnessed—after everything that sword had done—Kai had no particular interest in arguing with her arrangements. His old life, the quiet, managed, deliberately unremarkable existence he'd been constructing, was not coming back. He understood that clearly enough.
He crossed to the window and pulled the curtains open. Morning light broke across the room, and as it hit him, he noticed something. He turned his hand over, slowly closed it into a fist.
The sensation was difficult to describe—a fullness, a current running just beneath the surface of everything. As though his body had been quietly remade overnight and was waiting for him to notice.
The Devil body she mentioned.
He stood there for a moment, taking stock of it.
A few days ago, he had died and woken up in a new body in a new world. A few days after that, he'd been killed again and woken up as something that wasn't quite human anymore. The sheer volume of the past week compared to the previous twenty years of his life was almost difficult to hold in his mind at once.
"We should leave," Rias said, brushing her long hair back into order. "We'll be late."
They left the house together and walked toward the school.
It wasn't a long walk. As they neared the campus gate, the usual morning crowd of students was converging from all directions—and then, one by one, they began to stop.
Heads turned. Conversations dropped off mid-sentence. Kai watched the ripple of attention spread outward from them as they walked, and understood why.
Rias Gremory was not a person who passed unnoticed. She was the undisputed beauty of Kuoh Academy, the kind of presence that reduced people to silence and second glances. She had more admirers than anyone could count—and not one of them had ever gotten close to her. The distance she kept was absolute, and it was widely understood.
And here she was, walking in alongside the transfer student.
Kai pressed his mouth into a line.
He had worked carefully to be unremarkable. Approachable but forgettable. Present but not memorable. It had been a deliberate, calculated effort, and it had been working.
This was going to undo all of it.
"You don't enjoy being looked at," Rias observed, in the tone of someone confirming something she'd already suspected.
Kai was quiet for a beat. "You've noticed."
"That smile you wear. The way you keep everyone at just enough of a distance that they stay comfortable. It's deliberate, isn't it?"
He didn't deny it.
"Being too noticeable draws the wrong kind of attention," he said. "Being too withdrawn does the same. It's easier to find the middle ground and stay there."
Rias tilted her head, thinking it over. "So you wear a mask—but a carefully fitted one. Close enough to the crowd to go unquestioned, far enough away that no one actually gets in."
It wasn't a criticism. She seemed genuinely curious.
Kai said nothing, which was confirmation enough.
"You're a strange one," Rias said, and she was smiling again—but differently now. More thoughtful. "Do you dislike people? Or is it something else?"
"I don't dislike them," Kai said. "I just don't have a need for them."
Rias was quiet for a moment.
"I hope," she said eventually, "that we might become people you actually find worth keeping."
She said it lightly, offhandedly, as though it were a small thing. But her eyes when she glanced at him were direct and sincere.
Kai looked ahead and didn't answer.
But he didn't disagree, either.