High School DxD: Fox of Ill Omen

Issei

I woke up already annoyed.

At first I thought it was because my entire body hurt.

Then I tried to sit up and discovered that no, actually, my body hurting and me being annoyed were two separate problems that had simply decided to cooperate.

I made a noise somewhere between a groan and a death rattle and rolled onto my side instead.

Mountain training was a scam.

That was my official conclusion.

Yesterday had already included a climb that should have counted as attempted murder, sword practice that turned me into Yuuto-san’s personal disappointment, magic training with Akeno-san that had somehow weaponized both my demonic power and my perversion, Koneko-chan kicking years off my life, and Buchou calmly informing me that my current combat usefulness was somewhere between “limited” and “embarrassing.”

Now it was morning.

And there was more.

I stared at the ceiling for a few more seconds, then dragged myself up because staying in bed would just let me think too much, and thinking too much meant remembering Mira flattening me in one exchange like I was some idiot background character who’d wandered into the wrong scene.

Which I kind of had.

I changed, splashed water on my face, looked at myself in the mirror, and pointed at my reflection.

“You,” I said. “Are becoming useful today.”

My reflection looked unconvinced.

By the time I got to the main room, the house was already awake. The mountain light came in cool and pale through the open side of the room, making the house feel cleaner than any place full of sleep-deprived Devils had a right to feel.

Buchou was already there, seated with the kind of perfect posture that made me think she hadn’t slept at all or had somehow slept better than everyone else out of pure nobility. Akeno-san stood nearby with tea and notes. Koneko-chan was at the table, expression flat. Yuuto-san sat with a book open in front of her like she was actually prepared for whatever this was going to be.

Asia looked awake in the soft, trying-her-best way she always did.

Kusari-san was already there too, of course. Pale hair loose over one shoulder, ears and tail still present, face composed, sitting with a stillness that made it hard to tell whether she was calm or just very good at pretending not to feel anything.

I dropped onto a cushion and immediately regretted the speed of it.

“Morning,” I muttered.

“Good morning, Issei-san,” Asia said.

“Good morning, Issei-kun,” Akeno-san added.

Buchou looked at me once. “You’re late.”

I looked for a clock. “How can you tell?.”

“…Late….”

Harsh, Koneko-chan.

I muttered something very respectful under my breath and sat up straighter.

Akeno-san smiled as if she had definitely heard it and was saving it for later.

Buchou folded her hands. “This morning is for study.”

I blinked.

Of all the possible ways to suffer, that one hadn’t made my top five.

“Study?”

“Yes,” Yuuto-san said. “You can’t fight properly if you don’t understand the world you’re fighting in.”

“Can’t I just punch evil?”

“No,” Buchou, Yuuto-san, Akeno-san, and Koneko-chan all said at once.

Kusari-san quietly watched.

Asia looked apologetic on their behalf.

That made it worse.

The next stretch of time was educational in the same way being crushed under a bookshelf would technically increase the amount of information touching your body.

Devil houses. The old pillar families. Political structure. Fallen Angel organizations. Grigori. Seraphs. Great Kings. The sort of knowledge I absolutely understood was important and also absolutely resented having to learn while still sore enough to feel personally betrayed by the floor.

Asia actually did better than I did in some of it.

Not in the big flashy “haha, Issei, the ex-nun is smarter than you” kind of way.

Which somehow made it sting more.

She was just… trying. Listening carefully. Taking the information seriously. Following the logic in a straight line instead of wrestling with it until it surrendered from pity.

At one point Akeno-san asked me to explain the basic difference between the current Maou structure and the surviving influence of the old noble families.

I stared at her.

Then at the ceiling.

Then at the tea.

Then, because my brain hates me, I said, “The old families are like… inherited prestige, and the current Maou are … actual ruling power, but because the old families are still socially important and because of bloodlines and reputation and stuff, they overlap in a some way?”

Silence.

Then Yuuto-san gave the smallest nod.

“Crude,” she said. “But not wrong.”

I sat up.

“I’ll take it.”

Koneko-chan looked at me. “You shouldn’t.”

“I said I’ll take it.”

Buchou let that go, which probably meant the answer had counted enough to keep me alive.

Eventually the books closed.

At first I thought this meant freedom.

It meant training.

Again.

“Outside,” Buchou said.

That one word somehow contained all the cruelty of nobility.

We moved out into the mountain air. The day had sharpened since morning. Clean cold. Bright light. Open sky. The kind of weather that made exhaustion feel clearer instead of gentler.

Today I started exercising with Buchou first

“Ise! Keep going!”

“Osu!”

She had me climbing a steep mountain with a rock tied to my back.

On top of that, Buchou is sitting on the rock.

I'm repeatedly climbing down the mountain path, and then up the mountain path. 

The mountain path is exhausting.

By the time my legs got numb after I did dozens of laps, Buchou finally stopped me.

“Next is muscle training. We will go with push ups.”

“Y-Yes......”

She’s an Oni.

I have way more training than the other club members. Also for a [Pawn] who has to run around the battlefield the most, increasing your strength and stamina is an absolute requirement.

At least for me.

Kusari-san is still working on her magic. 

“Guwaa!”

Buchou mercilessly puts a rock on my back while I'm doing a push up.

Demonic-power truly is useful because you can increase your strength to lift a large rock with ease.

If only she used that to carry the luggage.

“Oof......”

Then Buchou sits on top of the rock.

“Now then, the three-hundred reps of push ups. Let’s start.”

“Osu!”

I would have already died a hundred times if I wasn't a Devil.

After that Yuuto-san took me first again for combat training.

Of course she did.

I picked up the practice sword and faced her across the clearing with as much dignity as a teenage idiot in training clothes and bruised pride could manage.

She looked at me once and sighed.

“Your stance is still bad.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“That was me being kind.”

I made a face at her.

Yuuto-san didn’t even have the decency to look guilty.

She stepped into position, short hair shifting slightly in the breeze, wooden sword settling in her grip as naturally as if it had always belonged there. There was something annoying about how graceful she was when she fought. Not flashy. Just clean in a way that made every mistake I made look louder.

“Again,” she said.

She moved.

I blocked.

Incorrectly.

She corrected me with the kind of tap to my wrist that somehow hurt more because it was light.

“Too tense.”

“I’m trying to hit you.”

“You’re trying to catch up to me,” she said. “That isn’t the same.”

She moved again before I could answer.

I hate when she does that.

The next several exchanges were a blur of me learning in increasingly painful ways that wanting to be better and actually being better had a whole valley full of suffering between them.

Yuuto-san’s style was still restrained compared to Koneko-chan’s, but that only made it more humiliating when she beat me. She wasn’t just faster. She was cleaner. More deliberate. She always knew where she wanted me to move before I understood where I was already going.

By the fourth time she knocked my blade off line, I was sweating hard enough to feel it in my eyes.

By the sixth, I was angry.

By the eighth, I was learning.

That was the worst one.

“Read my center,” Yuuto said.

“You keep saying that like it’s obvious!”

“It should become obvious.”

I lunged.

She pivoted.

My strike missed by enough that it felt like she was doing it on purpose. She tapped my ribs, my wrist, then the side of my shoulder before I fully recovered.

I stopped and glared.

Yuuto-san looked at me the way teachers look at students who are about to say something very stupid and a little entertaining.

I pointed my practice sword at her. “I want it on record that this would be going better if you weren’t so annoyingly good at everything.”

That made her blink.

Then, just barely, her mouth curved.

“Not everything.”

That was somehow worse.

I attacked again out of spite.

She put me on the ground.

Training continued like that until my body lost all sense of fairness.

After Yuuto-san was done with me, Koneko-chan took over because apparently the universe had decided there was still too much pride left in my skeleton.

Koneko-chan did not teach in words.

She taught in impacts.

If Yuuto-sa corrected me like a patient swordswoman dealing with a hopelessly emotional classmate, Koneko-chan corrected me like a physical law I had somehow offended.

“Don’t overextend.”

She swept my legs.

“Don’t open your guard.”

She hit me in the stomach.

“Don’t rely on your anger.”

She put me flat on my back with enough force to knock the mountain air out of my lungs.

I stared up at the sky and wondered whether the Rating Game would end my suffering.

“No,” Koneko-chan said.

I sat up halfway. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You were obvious.”

This peerage was a prison.

Not far from where Koneko-chan was dismantling me, I caught sight of Kusari-san between drills.

She was working apart from the rest of us near the side of the clearing, where the ground flattened into a more open strip beside the trees. Akeon-san had her there first, then Buchou, and later she was alone.

At first glance it didn’t look like much.

That was the strange part.

No huge spell circles. No lightning. No explosions. Just Kusari-san standing still, one hand lifted slightly, eyes narrowed toward some point in empty air or on the ground, then a small flicker of dark-violet power and—nothing.

Or almost nothing.

Her magic would form in some delicate, narrow way, like a line trying to become a shape.

Then it would fail.

Or hold for a second and vanish.

Or attach to a point in the dirt and collapse immediately after.

I watched long enough that Koneko-chan kicked my ankle.

“Focus.”

“I am focusing.”

“…You said the same thing yesterday.”

“Can you blame me?”

“Yes.”

Still, I kept glancing back.

Kusari-san’s training looked nothing like mine, but in some ways it looked worse. There was no simple progress to admire. No satisfying hit. Just attempt after attempt after attempt, all of them precise, all of them small, all of them apparently failing in ways only she and Buchou really understood.

At one point Kusari-san’s ears flattened and she pressed her fingers hard against the bridge of her nose and stood that way for a second before forcing her hand down again.

Her tail thrashed in what must have been annoyance for a moment. 

Then she tried again.

That stuck with me.

Because she didn’t look frustrated.

She looked determined not to let the frustration show.

By the time Akeno-san stole me away from Koneko-chan again for magical control work, my body had stopped complaining in individual locations and started speaking in one unified language of pain.

There were potatoes waiting.

I stared at them.

Then at Akeno-san.

Then at the sky.

“The most important step of my training.”

There was a tear in my eye. 

Akeno-san looked delighted. “Such enthusiasm. That will help.”

Asia was practicing slightly away. She had already moved on to shaping other elements beside water. She looked over briefly with concern and slight confusion at me and my vegetables. Her control from earlier practice had gotten cleaner. Mine had not gotten that much better, which felt personally insulting.

Akeno-san set a potato in front of me.

“Again,” she said.

I picked it up and glared at it.

“Remember,” she said smoothly, “you are not thinking like a fighter with a blade. You are thinking like Issei-kun.”

“That’s what I normally do.”

“Is it?”

She leaned in slightly, smiling in that infuriatingly soft way she used when she was about to say something indecent and knew I was incapable of not hearing it.

“Don’t think about cutting,” she murmured. “Think about removing what shouldn’t be there.”

Asia made a tiny choked sound and kept her eyes very carefully on her own work.

I looked at the potato.

Then at Akeno-san.

Then back at the potato.

“You really enjoy this.”

“Very much.”

That was obvious.

I tried again.

The demonic power ran thinner this time, more deliberate than before. Not enough to blast the poor vegetable off the table like yesterday. Just enough to strip a clean curl of peel away from the surface.

Akeno-san hummed approvingly.

“There. Better.”

I tried not to look proud of that.

I failed.

She saw it.

Of course she saw it.

“Ara. Now do it without pretending it wasn’t an accident.”

I hated how much she was enjoying watching me fail.  

Whatever this spell was going to become, it was going to help me accomplish my dreams.

But it still wasn’t there.

Not really.

It was like trying to grab a dirty thought in the exact instant before it turned into a word.

I wanted it.

I could almost touch it.

I still couldn’t make it happen.

By the time the sun started lowering, my brain was as tired as my body. That should not have been possible. Apparently it was.

We finally broke after the second round of training, and for a short, blessed while the estate settled into the kind of loose, tired quiet that meant everyone had hit the edge of what they could gracefully endure for one day.

I escaped to the side veranda with a cup of water and the intention of sitting there until someone ordered me back into motion.

The mountain stretched out below in dimming lines of green and shadow. The air had lost the day’s brightness and was turning cooler by the minute. Somewhere deeper in the house I could hear Akeno-san and Asia moving in the kitchen. Closer by, I heard one set of footsteps approach without much sound.

Kusari-san.

She stopped a little to my right, near one of the veranda pillars.

She didn’t seem to think someone would already be here. 

For a few seconds neither of us said anything.

Then I lifted the cup slightly. “Want water?”

She looked at the cup.

Then at me.

“No, thank you.”

“Alright...”

More silence.

I really should’ve let it stay that way.

Instead I heard myself say, “Your training looks more frustrating than mine.”

One of her ears turned before she turned her head toward me.

For one terrifying second I thought that had been too honest.

Then she said, “Your training looked much louder.”

I stared.

That was almost a joke.

I pointed at her with the cup. “That was definitely an insult.”

“I did not imply it wasn’t.”

Okay, yeah, that was absolutely a joke.

A tiny one.

Dry enough to miss if you weren’t paying attention.

Her tail seemed to sway behind her as if to give away her amusement.

I sat up straighter without meaning to.

Then she lifted one hand and flexed her fingers once before stilling them again.

That made me remember why I’d started talking in the first place.

“Does it always hurt that much?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “What?”

“Your magic.”

The small humor—if it had even really been there—vanished at once.

Ah.

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.

Still, I kept going because sometimes I have the survival instincts of a horny raccoon.

“Yesterday,” I said. “And today. You keep acting like it’s normal, but it doesn’t look normal.”

Kusari-san looked out toward the mountains rather than at me.

For a few seconds I thought she just wouldn’t answer.

Then she said, “Some costs are simply costs.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is an answer.”

“It’s a vague answer.”

“It is the one available.”

I groaned. “You really do that on purpose.”

This time I was sure I saw the smallest shift at the corner of her mouth.

Not quite a smile.

Something smaller than that.

Then it was gone.

I leaned back against the pillar behind me and took another drink of water. “Fine. Different question.”

She said nothing, which I took as permission because I am brave and stupid in equal measure.

“What do you think about Buchou’s engagement?”

That got her attention properly.

Her face did not change much, but one of her ears flicked to the side quickly. I felt something inside her lock down.

Finally she said, very quietly, “I think you are the only person in that room loud enough to call it ugly before the formal language finished dressing it.”

That shut me up.

I looked down into the cup in my hand.

After a second I laughed once, without any humor in it. “Yeah. That sounds like me.”

“Yes.”

That one was definitely an insult.

I accepted it anyway.

The mountain air moved through the space between us. Somewhere inside the house, someone laughed faintly—Akeno-san probably. The sound carried and faded again.

I looked at Kusari-san.

She was still standing with that same straight, too-careful posture. Pale hair loose now. Face unreadable if you didn’t know what to look for.

I didn’t.

Not really.

But I was starting to know when something under that face shifted.

“So what,” I asked, “you think we can’t win?”

She didn’t answer quickly.

That alone made me listen harder.

Then she said, “I think being angry is not the same as being difficult to defeat.”

Ow. But not wrong.

I stared at the mountain instead of at her and muttered, “I’m getting really tired of everyone pointing out my faults to me.”

“I imagine that would be exhausting.”

I looked at her again.

That was definitely a joke.

A mean one.

A small, dry, very deserved one.

And against my better judgment, I laughed for real this time.

Kusari-san blinked once, like she hadn’t fully expected that.

Then footsteps sounded behind us and the moment broke cleanly. Yuuto-san stuck her head partway out from the corridor leading toward the main room.

“Issei-kun, Kusari-san,” she said. “Buchou wants everyone back inside.”

I tipped my head back against the pillar and let out a long breath. “I just got a moment to breath.”

Yuuto-san’s eyes shifted once to Kusari-san, then back to me. “You can complain while moving.”

I pushed myself up with the kind of effort that should have earned applause and followed them in.

As I stepped back into the house, I found myself thinking about what Kusari-san had said.

Not the part about me being loud.

That part was obvious.

The other part.

Formal language dressing ugly things until people could bear to call them tradition.

I hated how right that sounded.

And I hated that the Kusari-san seemed to recognize that so quickly and easily. As if all the beautiful girls around me could see straight through a problem.

That was probably bad.

Definitely inconvenient.

Possibly fatal to my existence around pretty girls.

So, in other words, just another day.

Kusari

I should not have stayed outside as long as I did.

That was the first mistake.

The second was answering Hyoudou-san honestly.

Not full honestly.

That would have been much worse.

But honestly enough that the words showed more of myself than I should have allowed.

The mountain air had cooled further by the time I returned to the room I had been given. The house’s evening sounds had changed shape while I was outside. Kitchen noise had quieted. Doors opened and closed more softly. Voices lowered. The rhythms of shared exhaustion had begun settling the estate toward night.

I slid the door shut behind me.

The room received me exactly as it had in the morning: little in it, little of me in it, everything arranged in ways that could be undone quickly.

I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes.

That was a mistake too.

Behind them the afterimage of Veil Sight’s strain still lived as dull pressure and faint heat. Not enough to blind. Enough to remind. My hand ached less than yesterday. My shoulder had stopped complaining loudly enough to demand thought. The problem remained what it had been since Buchou assigned it.

Baleful Bolt was too costly when overcast.

Veil Sight made choosing targets easier, but leaning on it too much punished the eyes.

I needed something lighter.

Something that changed the shape of a fight before the blow landed.

I had almost reached it twice today.

Twice.

The failure remained irritating in exactly the way close answers always were.

I opened my eyes and looked at the far wall.

Then, before I could decide not to, I thought:

Koneko-chan noticed my discomfort before the others did.

I stilled.

Not Toujou

Koneko.

The thought had already formed.

Again.

Not because anyone else had spoken it.

Because my mind had reached for it that way first.

I stood immediately and crossed to the basin, splashing cold water over my face hard enough to sting.

When I lifted my head again, the room was unchanged.

The problem was not the room.

It was that the names were starting to move.

Inside.

That was more dangerous.

More dangerous than Hyoudou-san asking too directly what he should leave alone.

More dangerous, perhaps, than the fact that when he had laughed after my answer, some tight, unpleasant thing in my chest had eased rather than sharpened.

I dried my face slowly.

Tomorrow would begin again at dawn.

Study. Training. Control. Correction. Failure. Repetition.

Useful structure.

Safer than this.

And yet as I set the cloth aside and reached to loosen my hair fully, another thought formed before I stopped it.

Asia would likely knock too softly if she came by in the morning. 

I stood there in the quiet, fingers still half caught in my hair.

It happened again.

Asia.

Not Argento.

Not even by accident anymore.

The realization settled cold and sharp inside me.

Then, because the universe was apparently committed to proving me right about shared spaces and their dangers, there came the sound of light footsteps in the corridor outside—small, careful, familiar enough now that I recognized them before the knock even came.

Three soft taps.

Of course.

I closed my eyes once.

Then opened them again and crossed the room.

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