The dark was not empty. It felt thick.
It pressed against his eyelids like damp wool. Ren tried to move his fingers, but there was no ground beneath him. He was floating in a terrifying, freezing numbness. He did not know what city he was in. He did not know if he was breathing. The memory of the boardroom and the filthy alleyway blended into a senseless, gray static. Something was fundamentally wrong.
Then, the steady, rhythmic sound anchored him.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
He dragged his consciousness upward through the mud. The first thing that registered was the smell. It was sharp. It burned the inside of his nose. Industrial bleach. Iodine. Stiff, over-washed linen.
He took a shallow breath.
A sharp, electric jolt of panic violently hijacked his nervous system. His stomach dropped. It was the visceral, sickening physical sensation of falling from a great height without a parachute. The phantom weight of massive, wet feathers dragged him down. The air in the room vanished.
I am useless. They are going to replace me.
The alien thought did not just echo in his skull. It came with a phantom, searing pain between his shoulder blades. Ren gasped. His eyes snapped open. He violently jerked upward.
The heart monitor beside the bed erupted into a frantic, high-pitched tempo.
He was not falling. There were no black wings. He was sitting upright in a sterile hospital bed. The room was bathed in the harsh, buzzing glow of fluorescent overhead lights.
Ren clamped a trembling hand over his face. He dug his fingernails into his forehead. He forced his lungs to expand. In. Out. He visualized the polished mahogany table from his past life. He built a mental wall, brick by brick, shutting out the pathetic, desperate insecurities of the Fallen Angel he had bound to his soul.
The frantic beeping of the monitor gradually slowed. It returned to a steady pulse.
The psychological toll was not a metaphor. The Parasitic Contract was tearing at his biology. He owned Raynare's obedience, but he was forced to physically process her deepest traumas. He was a landlord renting space in his own head to a nightmare.
He lowered his hand. His fingers brushed against the coarse fabric of a faded blue hospital gown. The center of his chest was wrapped tightly in thick white gauze. He pressed his palm against the bandages. A dull, heavy ache radiated outward from his sternum. His human body was miraculously intact, but it felt like a cracked glass cup.
"System," Ren thought. The mental command felt sluggish. It felt like trying to run underwater.
The heavy scent of burning parchment did not fill the room. Instead, a faint, flickering golden text materialized at the edge of his vision. The letters were fractured.
[The Archive of Absolute Contracts][Host Vitality: Stable. Severe energetic exhaustion detected.][Active Contracts: 1][Warning: Soul capacity compromised. Drafting new contracts disabled.]
Ren stared at the broken text. He was defenseless. If another supernatural entity walked through the door right now, he had absolutely nothing to trade.
"You requested a human hospital."
The voice came from the dark corner of the room, near the window. It was soft. It carried a polite, aristocratic lilt that completely contradicted the predatory chill it sent down Ren's spine.
Ren did not flinch. He slowly turned his heavy head.
A girl sat in the vinyl visitor's chair. She had long, midnight-black hair tied in a flawless ponytail. She wore the Kuoh Academy uniform. Her dark violet eyes watched him with deep, sadistic amusement.
"Kuoh General Hospital," the girl continued smoothly. "Entirely staffed by human doctors. No magic was used to heal your impressive wound. Only modern medicine. The President kept her word."
The smell of bleach in the room was suddenly overpowered. Ozone. The sharp, metallic scent of the air right before a devastating lightning strike.
Ren held her gaze. He recognized the archetype. The fixer. The smiling enforcer.
"Akeno Himejima," Ren managed to say.
His throat felt like sandpaper. He had to stop and swallow dryly. The simple act of speaking sent a spike of pain through his chest. He pulled the name from the fragmented memories of the original Ren Kuruma.
Akeno's smile widened just a fraction. The temperature in the hospital room dropped noticeably. The fluorescent light above them gave a faint, erratic buzz.
"You know my name," Akeno noted. She leaned forward slightly. "Yet you have zero magical presence. You are a complete anomaly. Rias spent the entire night wondering how a normal student managed to negotiate his own survival with a Fallen Angel while bleeding out in the mud."
"I am..." Ren paused. He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, fighting a wave of nausea. "Persuasive."
He leaned back against the stiff hospital pillows. He forced his hands to rest openly on the coarse blanket.
"You are arrogant," Akeno corrected him gently. "You rejected an Evil Piece. You demanded terms from a King. Do you understand how close you came to being erased simply for your insolence?"
"I understand... leverage," Ren breathed out. He looked at the glowing green lines of the heart monitor, then back to her. "She wants the Fallen Angels out. She needs to know what they are hunting. I offered her the intelligence."
Akeno stood up. She moved with absolute silence. She walked to the side of his bed. She reached out and lightly traced the plastic casing of the heart monitor with her perfectly manicured fingertip.
"A mutually beneficial arrangement implies equality," Akeno whispered. Her violet eyes locked onto his. "You are not equal. You are a fragile, broken little boy sitting in a hospital bed. The only reason your heart is currently beating is because my President allowed it."
Ren did not break eye contact. The monitor beside him betrayed his calm exterior. The tempo increased slightly. Beep. Beep. Beep.
He could not fight her. But submission invited immediate exploitation.
"She allowed it... because I am useful." Ren kept his voice completely flat, though his jaw ached with the effort. "If I die, her only link to their operation dies with me. You can threaten me, Himejima. But you will not kill me."
He paused, tasting the lingering metallic tang of blood in the back of his mouth.
"It would be bad for business."
Akeno stared at him. The sadistic amusement in her eyes slowly hardened into cold, calculating respect. She realized he was not bluffing. He fully understood his own pathetic vulnerability, and he weaponized it anyway.
She stepped back. The oppressive smell of ozone faded. The harsh scent of bleach returned.
"The hospital bill has been paid in full," Akeno said. Her polite tone returned. "You will be discharged in three days. The doctors believe you survived a freak industrial accident."
She walked toward the door. She paused with her hand on the metal handle.
"The President expects a report on this Sacred Gear," Akeno said without looking back. "You bought your life with that information. You have one week to deliver a target. If you fail to prove your usefulness by then, we will realize you are just a liar."
She turned her head slightly.
"And Devils despise liars."
The heavy wooden door clicked shut.
Ren was alone.
He did not move. He stared up at the harsh fluorescent light buzzing on the ceiling. The rhythmic beeping of the monitor filled the empty, sterile room. He felt absolutely nothing for ten long seconds. Just a vast, terrifying hollow space in his chest.
One week.
The adrenaline finally crashed. His hands began to tremble violently. He gripped the thin hospital blanket, his knuckles turning white.
He had survived the Devil King by selling her a massive lie. He had told Rias that Raynare was hunting a specific Sacred Gear. It was a brilliant negotiation tactic in the moment.
But it was a delayed execution. He had exactly seven days to deliver a Sacred Gear user to the Gremory peerage. If he did not feed them a target, they would erase him.
Ren closed his eyes. The buzzing of the light fixture seemed to grow louder.
He had to find a scapegoat. He had to feed someone to the monsters to maintain his own cover. He sifted through the cloudy memories of the high school student whose body he had hijacked. He pushed past the memories of boring math classes and lonely lunches.
A face surfaced in his mind.
A loud, obnoxious boy with brown hair. Issei Hyoudou. Ren remembered a fleeting, vivid image. Issei laughing in the school courtyard, sharing half of his lunch with a stray cat. A stupid, simple boy who radiated a strange, latent energy. A boy who had recently been acting incredibly nervous, jumping at shadows, claiming he had gotten a girlfriend out of nowhere.
Ren's fingers tightened on the coarse fabric of the blanket.
No. The thought came unbidden. The human part of him, the boy who used to own this body, recoiled violently. Issei was innocent. He was just a kid.
Ren stared at his trembling hands. The room felt incredibly cold. He was going to manipulate an innocent high school student. He was going to paint a massive target on Issei's back and use him as a human shield in a war between mythic factions.
He waited for the hesitation to stop him. He waited for his conscience to win.
The cold logic of the corporate liquidator settled over his mind like a heavy frost, suffocating the guilt.
Cost versus cost. Issei's safety versus his own survival.
It was not a difficult choice. It was just business.
Ren pulled the coarse hospital blanket up to his chin. He stared at the blank white wall, waiting for the guilt to return.
It never did.