High School DxD: Fox of Ill Omen

Rias

Kusari stood in the doorway like something the night itself had refused to swallow.

Too pale.

Too bloody.

Too exhausted to stand without the doorframe and yet still somehow upright by will alone.

For one second, all of us looked at her.

Me.

Asia.

Riser.

Issei.

Even the fire around Riser seemed to ease for that heartbeat, as if the battlefield itself had not expected another piece to climb this far and this broken.

Three white tails hung behind her without glamour now, visibly heavy with strain.

Her left arm was useless at her side, fingers curled wrong.

Her side was burnt with her clothes shredded near the burn and she was heavily favoring her left leg. 

Blood had dried on the wounds across her body.

At  one corner of her mouth and freshened again lower down where she had bitten through it at some point and not cared enough to stop. 

But her eyes—

Her eyes were still sharp.

Still here.

Still frighteningly present.

My heart lurched with relief so hard it hurt.

“Kusari-chan—”

That was as far as I got.

The moment broke.

Riser moved.

He was too experienced, too arrogant, too certain of his own advantage to let sentiment live on a battlefield any longer than it absolutely had to.

Flame rolled off him again as he came forward, the rooftop heat rising around his body like the whole ruined school existed only to make his silhouette grander.

Ise launched himself back into motion at once.

He should not have been able to.

That was the first terrible thing.

His body had already gone beyond the point where anyone sensible would have stopped.

Promoting to [Queen] had carried him farther, yes.

The mountain had made him tougher.

My unsealing of his evil pieces had widened his frame for battle.

But there was a limit under all of that, and I could see he had crossed it already.

Still, he ran.

Because he was Ise.

Because the stupid, wonderful boy I cared for did not understand the word “enough” when I was still standing inside the same fight.

He hit Riser with everything he still had left.

Boosted Gear flared.

His fist came in hard.

I joined with a blast of destruction from the side.

Asia rushed towards Kusari to heal her. 

Kusari joined the fight too.

Not cleanly.

Not like before.

Not with the eerie, precise control she had shown in support lines and marked battlefields.

She was too hurt for that.

But she came anyway.

One tail flicked hard enough to steady her as she stepped off the doorframe.

An illusion formed around her outline for half a second and then died under the effort of sustaining anything extra.

She planted a mark with visible strain.

The cold numbness from Stillmark had to be eating her alive now. 

I could see the tightness under her ribs, the way her breath kept forgetting to come in evenly. 

But she still forced it into the floor where Riser’s next move would be.

Then she hit him with a Baleful Bolt.

The curse-lightning cracked out of her good arm in a black-violet spear and struck Riser square in the shoulder.

For one glorious instant, it burned through him.

Then he regenerated through it.

He staggered half a step, rotated the shoulder once as if testing whether the joint still pleased him, and smirked at her. 

Too many times.

Too much fire.

Too little cost.

We were not losing in one dramatic blow.

We were losing in numbers the body understood before the mind did.

Asia reached Kusari.

She began to heal her and said something to her to her quickly.

They were too far and there was too much going on for me to hear what was said. 

Kusari responded and shook her head while she quickly moved Asia away from one of Riser’s attacks. 

Asia scampered back behind us as she thanked Kusari.

The next exchange made that brutally clear.

Ise came in high.

I came in from the side.

Kusari tried to force an opening for our attacks

Riser accepted the damage from my attack, broke through the tail end of Kusari’s mark before it could fully settle, caught Ise’s arm, and threw him down onto the rooftop so hard the sound of it turned my blood to ice.

“Ise!”

He tried to rise anyway.

Of course he did.

He got halfway to one knee.

[Burst!].

The boy swayed where he knelt, gauntlet pressed to the ground to steady him, breathing shallowly, and bleeding from his head, mouth, and chest.

For one impossible second he looked like he was going to get up again and be the same reckless human boy who had once smiled up at me and insisted he would fight for me no matter what the world thought of his odds.

Then he spat up blood.

Riser stepped toward him.

“Ise!”

I moved without thinking.

“Issei-san”

Asia shouted nearly crying as she rushed to him as well.

I reached him first and caught him before he could pitch forward fully.

His body was hot with exertion, trembling everywhere, sweat-soaked and battered to the point where even Asia’s healing could no longer make the damage look manageable.

His head fell against me heavily enough that my heart stopped for one awful second.

His eyes were open.

That was the problem.

Open, but no longer really seeing.

Not gone.

Not yet.

But moving on will and habit and the remains of promises that had already outlived the body making them.

Asia kneeled next to him and tried to force more out of her twilight healing, but the green healing light was faint.

She was at her limit. 

“I-I’ll heal you Issei-san, I promise! J-just h-hold o-on-n!”

Asia was crying as she tried to reassure him.

“No,” I whispered, and then louder, because he was still trying to get up. “No. It’s all right now, Ise!”

He pushed weakly against my shoulder anyway.

Of course he did.

He was still trying to move forward.

Still trying to fight.

Still trying to reach the enemy in a body that had already given him everything it had.

I held him tighter.

“Stop.”

He didn’t.

“Issei-san don’t!”

Asia protested as she held onto one of his arms. 

He tried to force his hands under himself and rise again, fists clenching and unclenching uselessly against the ground as if the memory of fighting was still stronger than consciousness itself.

My vision blurred.

Not here.

Not now.

But the tears came anyway.

“You idiot,” I whispered, voice breaking under the weight of too much fear and love and too much helplessness at once. “Youre such a fool.”

His strength broke then.

Not all at once, not dramatically. It simply left him.

He sagged fully into my arms, and I lowered him carefully onto my lap on the ruined rooftop just as he had once so stupidly asked for and so childishly wanted.

Asia was crying again as she desperately tried to heal him. 

The world around me shrank to one thing. 

Ise in my arms.

Barely conscious.

Still trying to move even now.

Still fighting for me after the body had long since asked him to stop.

No one in this match had given me more than he had.

Not because he was strongest.

Not because he was most refined.

Because he had nothing but heart and still spent all of it.

His lips moved.

No sound came at first.

Then, barely, rough and half gone, “Buchou…”

I touched his hair back from his forehead with shaking fingers.

“It’s enough,” I whispered. “You did enough.”

A shadow fell across us.

Riser had stopped only a few paces away.

He was still burning.

Still regenerating.

Still not tired enough.

That was the simple cruelty of it.

I looked at him.

Then down at Ise as he started to disappear in retirement light.

Then at Asia next to me, pale and frantic and already too low on strength herself.

Then at Kusari, who remained upright by some act of pure hatred toward collapse.

I understood it.

I had no more moves.

The battle had reached the shape I had most dreaded and known, somewhere beneath all my denial, that it would always tend toward.

Checkmate.

I bent my head and pressed one last kiss to Ise’s hair.

Then I looked up at Riser and said the words.

“It’s my l—”

“Get up.”

Kusari’s voice cut across mine like a knife dragged too hard across old wire.

I turned.

She was still standing, though “standing” had become a rude simplification of what her body was actually doing. 

One tail braced low against the ground to keep her centered. 

Her one arm uselessly hung at her side now, and the other—the good one—shook openly now, fingers flexing in pain that had long ago moved past concealment.

Her face was white.

It made the blood on it more apparent.

She looked like she should’ve retired already. 

From her wounds and the backlash of everything she had forced herself to cast since the start of the game.

My heart lurched all over again.

“Kusari-chan—”

“Get up,” she said again, eyes on Riser, not me. “Do not surrender while you can still stand.”

That should have angered me.

It did not.

Because she was right.

Because I hated that she was right.

Because the [King] in me wanted to rise even while the woman holding Ise wanted only to keep him and give up on this fight.

Riser laughed softly.

“Charming,” he said. “Even now your broken little fox wants one more try.”

He looked at Kusari properly, then back to me and I saw the instant he noticed the retirement light.

His smile widened.

“Oh,” he said. “The lecherous boy is done. I’m surprised it took so long. And the other pawn looks like she’s about to drop. Why are you still pretending you can fight Rias?”

Kusari ignored him.

She finally took her eyes off of the enemy and  looked to me.

“If you surrender while I still have more to give,” she said, and every word cost her visibly, “I will be angry.”

That would have been absurd on anyone else.

On her, standing there with pain and pride and sheer refusal holding her up, it sounded almost irrefutable. 

Issei disappeared into retirement light completely.

Asia stared at where he was while wiping tears from her eyes.

His loss hurt far more than I could have imagined. 

I moved to stand. 

My legs hated me for it.

I did it anyway.

Riser watched us both like a man indulging theater before the curtain dropped.

“Very well,” he said. “Go on. Let me see what your last, worthless servants think passes for defiance.”

Kusari turned toward him then.

At last.

She lifted her good arm.

Baleful Bolt gathered there in a line of black-violet force that was far smaller than before.

“You’re serious?” he said. “You’re actually planning to throw away what’s left of yourself on that?”

Kusari’ answer was silence.

The bolt grew denser.

Riser didn't recognize what she was doing and continued to mock her.

I saw how far she was pushing the spell.

I realized then that she had promoted too. 

Not to a [Queen] like Ise had.

The way her demonic energy was acting to the spell was more precise than that.

 [Bishop].

He came forward one step, perhaps finally understanding that even wounded, even fading, even at the edge of retirement, she was still dangerous enough to wound him if he disrespected the line too fully.

“I think it’s time to put the anima-“

Too late.

Kusari fired.

Baleful Bolt screamed across the rooftop and expanded into a single colossal line of cursed-lightning.

Violent, hateful, and exact.

The retirement light took her at almost same instant.

Violently.

The pale glow was not gentle, instead it yanked her out of the battlefield in the middle of the cast.

For one impossible second the bolt existed and she did not, the spell continuing on sheer momentum after the body that made it had already been torn from the game.

Then it hit Riser in the chest.

The impact blasted him backward hard enough to tear his feet from the rooftop and slam him into a half wall by the edge of the roof. Fire erupted around him. Concrete split. The whole roof shook under the force of it.

For one moment—

one beautiful, stupid, desperate moment—

I thought that might actually be enough.

Then the flames drew inward.

Riser stood up.

He regenerated.

But not cleanly.

He bent at the waist and coughed.

Blood hit the rooftop.

Real blood.

Not symbolic damage.

Not a momentary burn already forgotten by the body.

He wiped his mouth slowly and looked at the stain on his hand.

For the first time since the match began, his expression held something that was not amusement.

He looked up at the space where Kusari had vanished with rage. 

Then at me.

And in that instant I knew two things at once:

Kusari had not failed because she was weak.

She had failed because her body failed her before she ran out of will.

And I had, truly, no moves left now.

Akeno gone.

Yuuto gone.

Koneko gone.

Kusari gone.

Ise gone.

Asia spent and still kneeling where Ise should be.

Riser bloodied—but still standing.

I closed my eyes.

Only for one breath.

Then I opened them again and bowed my head.

“It is my loss,” I said.

The words tasted like ash.

“I surrender.”

The rooftop dissolved.

The Occult Research Club room returned around us like waking into a bruise.

Everything hurt.

That was the first truth.

The second was that all of us who had survived back into the room looked like we had been dragged there by force rather than brought home.

Asia nearly stumbled the second her feet touched the floor again and then immediately looked around for the others instead of herself.

Akeno was already there, pale and exhausted but upright.

Yuuto stood with one hand braced on the back of a chair, breathing carefully through what had to be awful pain.

Koneko was there too now looking only bruied rather than battered.

Issei was not with us, probably unconscious and kept elsewhere by the officials because of how bad his condition was when he had collapsed before the match ended.

And Kusari—

Kusari had returned only just ahead of us.

She was seated on the low sofa with one tail half-curled tight around her side as if she was trying to hold herself together if. 

Her one arm was draped uselessly across her lap, the other only looked a bit better.

Koneko stood in front of her, expression flat and intent, helping guide the arm into a sling with the sort of quiet, stubborn precision that made the act itself feel like a statement.

Her arm was limp in Koneko’s grasp and the skin on some of fingers and part of her palm looked blackened—almost as if her last spell charred them. 

Asia saw it and made a beeline straight for them.

“Kusari-san!”

She dropped to her knees at once beside the sofa, hands already glowing softly green despite how tired she was.

Koneko shifted just enough to let her in without fully yielding the space.

Kusari looked up.

Pale.

Spent.

Still trying to sit straighter than anyone in her condition had any right to.

“Where’s Issei-san?”

Asia questioned as she started to help Kusari

“We were told that his injuries required immediate attention and that he was taken elsewhere to be treated.”

Yuuto answered while watching Asia work on Kusari. 

She was in as bad of a condition as Ise was, so why wasn’t she sent somewhere to be treated?

I would have to get Grayfia to bring a healer since Asia was exhausted. 

Asia reached for the sling first, adjusting what Koneko had done into something less immediately painful. Koneko, rather than stepping away, held the fabric steady for her.

No one spoke for a few seconds.

The room was too tired for false reassurance.

Akeno looked at Kusari’s face and then away because if she looked longer she might say something too sharp or too kind and either would probably hurt.

Yuuto’s gaze lingered on the sling, on the tails, on the exhaustion under Kusari’s skin, and for once she had no practical advice ready enough to offer.

I stood in the center of my ruined clubroom and felt the weight of every person still left in it.

My peerage.

Broken and battered.

But still mine. 

Then Grayfia stepped forward.

I hadn’t realized she was here. 

Of course she had waited until we were all present enough to hear it.

Her silver hair gleamed untouched. Her face was perfectly calm. Her hands folded at her waist in in the same graceful way as always.

“The Rating Game has concluded,” she said.

No one answered.

No one needed to.

Grayfia’s voice remained even. “Rias Gremory-sama has lost. Preparations for the wedding will begin shortly.”

Asia went very still.

Akeno’s jaw tightened.

Yuuto looked down.

Koneko did not move at all.

My own face did not change.

I was proud of that for almost half a second.

Then Grayfia turned her attention to Kusari. 

“Additionally,” she said, “Kusari will be removed from the peerage.”

The room changed.

Koneko’s hand tightened on the edge of the sling.

Asia looked up in horror.

Akeno’s expression sharpened into something very dangerous.

Yuuto straightened despite the pain.

And Kusari—

Kusari did not speak.

That frightened me more than anything else Grayfia had said.

Grayfia continued as if she had merely announced the weather. “It has been decided she can no longer be controlled in Rias Gremory-sama’s peerage.”

The silence after that was so complete it felt like the whole room had forgotten how to breathe.

The same reason for having Gasper sealed away was being used to remove Kusari. 

And then, because the world had already taken nearly everything from me tonight and apparently still found appetite left, I realized that the next battle was not going to be fought on a rooftop at all.

It was going to be fought here.

In my clubroom.

With Onii-sama’s [Queen], my Onee-sama, standing before me.

With my defeated peerage still bleeding on my furniture.

With Kusari seated on my sofa in a sling while Koneko and Asia held her together in different ways.

With Ise missing, probably unconscious somewhere being healed. 

The match was over.

The game had ended.

And somehow, impossibly, everything had only just become worse.

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