High School DxD: Fox of Ill Omen

Rias

No one spoke after Grayfia said it.

Not because anyone accepted it.

Because for one second the words were too shocking to process.

The wedding would be held shortly.

Kusari would be removed from my peerage.

It was the second sentence that struck harder.

Perhaps because I was already too tired to properly react to the first.

Perhaps because I had spent the whole match losing people one by one and some stupid, hopeful part of me had believed that once the game ended, at least what remained would be allowed to remain.

That had been naïve.

The Occult Research Club room still looked like our room, but the battle had followed us back into it all the same.

Akeno stood near the window with soot at one shoulder and blood dried at the edge of one sleeve.

Yuuto was upright by force of discipline and little else.

Asia was sitting beside Kusari on the sofa with both hands lit green and trembling from overuse.

Koneko kneeled close enough that one of her shoulders nearly brushed Kusari’s knee, helping hold the sling steady while Asia adjusted it.

Kusari herself sat too straight.

Her skin had gone pale enough that it made the blood at the corner of her mouth stand out cruelly.

One arm was useless.

Three white tails rested behind and beside her without hiding now, too heavy-looking to belong to someone truly healthy and too beautiful to be anything but dangerous to the wrong sort of noble eye.

Grayfia had looked at that and acted like Kusari was no longer necessary.

Something hot and shaking rose through me.

“What?”

It came out quieter than I intended.

Grayfia turned her eyes to me at once.

Not unkindly.

Not kindly either.

The formal neutrality of someone delivering something already decided somewhere far above the room she stood in.

“Kusari is being removed from your service,” she said. “The matter has already been determined.”

My hands clenched.

“She is my servant.”

Grayfia inclined her head the smallest degree. “You were defeated, Rias-ojousama.”

Every person in the room stiffened at that.

“What does that have to do with her position in my peerage?”

Akeno was the first to move.

Only half a step.

“And what, exactly, is the justification?” she asked.

Her voice was sweet in the way poison can be sweet.

Grayfia looked to her.

“Kusari has injured or attacked her previous [Kings] and fellow peerage members before,” she said simply. “Now that one of her seals has been released, and with Rias-ojousama’s marriage to Riser-sama about to proceed, Sirzechs-sama has judged her too dangerous to remain at Rias-ojousama’s side.”

The room changed shape around that sentence.

Yuuto straightened.

Asia’s healing light flickered.

Koneko’s fingers tightened where they held the sling in place.

I took one step forward.

“She protected us.”

Grayfia did not blink. “She is unstable.”

“She nearly won us half that game!”

“She is still unstable.”

The calmness of it made me want to scream.

The sort of rage that would have gladly overturned the whole room if my body had still possessed enough strength to indulge it.

Instead I forced myself one breath deeper and said, “You are twisting it.”

Something like thought passed across Grayfia’s face.

Then, carefully, “Am I?”

I knew that tone.

It was the tone of someone about to make a vile argument and dress it in enough reason that older Devils could applaud themselves for hearing it.

She looked past me, toward Kusari, though she still spoke to the room.

“Her seal was removed by your hand,” Grayfia said. “If she remained near you, how long would it be before she persuaded you to remove another?”

That landed exactly as filthily as intended.

Asia made a small sound of immediate distress.

Yuuto’s stepped closer to th rest of us. 

Akeno’s smile vanished altogether.

Koneko said, flatly and with visible hate, “That’s disgusting.”

I took another step.

“She did not manipulate me.”

Grayfia held my gaze. “Sirzechs-sama believes otherwise.”

“I don’t care what Onii-sama believes.”

That was the wrong answer politically.

I did not care.

Akeno moved to my side then, no longer even pretending to soften the edge in her expression.

“Neither do I,” she said.

Yuuto’s voice followed, quieter, but no less dangerous for it. “Kusari has obeyed orders. She fought for this peerage. She protected Asia. She supported Issei and Koneko. If Sirzechs-sama wants to call that manipulation, then he’s calling loyalty by the wrong name.”

Asia looked up from where she knelt, green light still around her fingers. Even exhausted, even frightened, she found her voice.

“Kusari-san didn’t make Buchou do anything,” she said. “Buchou chose to trust her.”

Grayfia’s expression did not change.

Koneko’s did.

She moved more clearly into the space by Kusari’s side, making it obvious in a way only she could that anyone wanting to take her would have to walk through Koneko’s refusal to do it.

“She stays,” Koneko said.

It was not a request.

Not a debate.

Just a statement of what the world should have been.

Kusari looked at none of us.

That was what frightened me.

She looked at her lap.

Too still.

Too controlled.

Like some part of her already knew this language better than the rest of us and was listening for the next order rather than whether it should have been spoken at all.

Grayfia took in all of us, one by one.

“This is not being discussed,” she said. “It has already been decided by Sirzechs-sama.”

There it was.

The true weapon in the room.

No argument.

Only authority.

I felt the old, ugly weight of hierarchy settle over the clubroom.

We were hurt. 

We had lost.

Issei was unconscious somewhere outside this room.

And Onii-sama had already spoken.

Everything about this moment had been arranged so that resistance could be labeled emotional, childish, improper.

I hated it.

I hated Onii-sama right now.

I hated that some small, brutal part of me understood exactly how and why it had been done this way.

“No,” I said.

Grayfia looked at me.

I kept going.

“No.”

It sounded smaller the second time.

Weaker.

My exhaustion was catching up, and the fact of it made me despise myself more.

Kusari moved then.

Only a little.

Enough that every eye in the room found her at once.

She rose from the sofa too carefully, as if the act itself had to be negotiated between pain and balance.

Asia tried to help.

Koneko did help without asking.

The sling sat awkwardly over one shoulder.

Her three tails dragged lower behind her than they should have.

Still she stood.

“Kusari-chan,” Akeno said softly.

Kusari shook her head once.

Then, to all of us, she said, “Stop.”

The room froze.

Not because she had raised her voice.

She had not.

The word was quiet enough to miss if it had come from anyone else. Coming from her now, it sounded like surrender trying to dress itself as restraint.

“It is all right,” she said.

Nothing in me accepted that sentence.

But I heard the shape beneath it all the same.

Do not make this worse.

Do not spend yourselves on what cannot be stopped.

Do not force the something that will never work. 

Koneko’s face tightened.

“No.”

It was the same word I had used.

Stronger in her mouth than it had been in mine.

Kusari’s gaze flicked toward her for one second.

Something moved there.

Not surprise. 

Something else.

Then it was gone.

Asia’s hands had lowered now, the healing light fading in patches because her strength was nearly gone too. “Kusari-san…”

Kusari looked at her next and gave the smallest shake of the head.

I knew that one too.

Please don’t.

Please don’t make me hear you beg for me.

Please don’t make me watch that.

My throat hurt.

Grayfia stepped forward exactly then, because of course she would choose the moment when the room was most wounded and least able to coherently resist.

“Kusari.”

She did not use any other title.

Kusari bowed her head at once.

That did it.

The old obedience in the motion.

The speed of it.

The way her body still knew how to answer high authority before her mind had the chance to protect itself.

I moved.

Not fast enough to strike.

I knew that before I started.

Fast enough to stand between them if nothing else.

Akeno came with me.

Yuuto too.

Koneko did not move because she was already there.

Grayfia’s eyes passed over all of us and settled finally on me.

“Rias-ojousama,” she said, and there was the faintest hint of warning in it now, “do not force this into something cruder.”

I laughed once.

It sounded awful.

“Cruder?”

The word came out raw enough to strip its own politeness. 

“You come into my clubroom, tell me my life has been decided, tell me my servant is too dangerous to keep because I trusted her, and I am the one making this crude?”

Akeno’s demonic power stirred.

Yuuto’s stance shifted a fraction.

Koneko lowered her center of gravity.

Grayfia saw all of it.

Of course she did.

Her voice remained even.

“You have already been defeated,” she said. “Do not lose further.”

There it was.

The room’s true line.

Not you cannot stop me.

You cannot stop me without destroying yourselves even more first.

Kusari said my name then.

Not “Buchou.”

Not any of the safer, more distant forms she had clung to for most of her time with us.

“Rias.”

The room went silent in an entirely different way.

My head snapped toward her.

She looked exhausted.

Pale.

Wounded.

One arm useless.

Three tails limp.

And, for one impossible second, more herself than she had been all evening.

“It is all right,” she said again.

No.

It was not.

But this time the meaning underneath the sentence had changed.

Please stop.

You will not win this.

My eyes burned.

I hated that she was right too.

I hated more that she still thought she needed to comfort us while being taken.

Grayfia stepped to her side.

Koneko moved first, small body rigid as wire, and if Akeno had not caught her shoulder in time she might actually have thrown herself at Grayfia and the room would have turned into something none of us could survive politically or physically.

“Koneko,” Kusari said quietly.

Koneko went still.

Then, because today had never once shown mercy to softness, Kusari added, “Please.”

That was what made Koneko stop.

Not Grayfia.

Not my authority.

Kusari asking.

Asia’s face crumpled.

Yuuto looked away only for a second and then back, as if refusing herself the weakness of missing anything.

Akeno’s hand remained on Koneko’s shoulder, her own expression colder than I had ever seen it inside this room.

I wanted badly to stop this, but knew that I had no way.

Grayfia took Kusari’s good arm lightly, not cruelly, not gently either.

Efficiently.

I will hate that touch for the rest of my life.

Kusari did not resist.

She only looked back at us once.

At Koneko nearest.

At Asia still on her knees.

At Akeno and Yuuto standing ready for a fight none of us could afford.

At me.

There was too much in that look.

Apology.

Attachment.

The awful old training trying to turn this into acceptance.

And something else too—

Fear.

Not of Grayfia.

Not of Sirzechs exactly.

Of what this meant.

Of what she had always believed she was in the end.

Disposal after usefulness.

I took one step after them anyway.

Grayfia stopped at the center of the room and turned just enough that her profile showed.

“That is enough,” she said.

Not to Kusari.

To us.

I felt every pair of eyes in the room on me then.

Mine to decide.

Mine to worsen.

Mine to stop.

I could not breathe around the lump in my throat.

Slowly, because my body no longer had enough strength for anything dramatic and because Kusari’s eyes were still on me asking me not to burn the room down around her, I stopped moving.

Grayfia activated the magic circle.

It’s glow lit up the two of them. 

Then she took Kusari away.

The tails vanished last, white against the glow of the circle.

Silence hit the room like a second defeat.

No one moved for a long time.

Asia was the first to break.

She made one small, wounded sound and pressed both hands over her mouth like she could hold everything else in if she just stopped that one from escaping.

Koneko stood exactly where she had been and stared at the space Kusari had been moments ago, with an expression so empty it frightened me more than tears would have.

Akeno’s hand had dropped from her shoulder now, but the look on her face had become something sharp enough to wound with.

Yuuto closed her eyes once.

Only once.

Then opened them again, because of course she would not give the room more of her damage than she chose.

And me—

I stood in the center of my ruined clubroom and understood, all at once, that the loss on the rooftop had not been the real end of anything.

This was.

Not because the game mattered less.

Because the game had only opened the door for the rest.

I looked at the sofa where Kusari had been sitting only moments ago, at the sling half-left behind because Koneko had not finished adjusting it, at the faint trace of healing light Asia’s magic had left in the air, at the tails that were no longer here to move across the floor and make the room too full.

My peerage had not only lost.

It had been judged weak enough to be rearranged.

And Issei still slept through all of it.

That thought alone nearly broke me.

I lowered myself into my chair because my legs no longer trusted standing, and because if I remained upright another second I might start screaming and never finish.

No one spoke.

No one tried to comfort anyone else.

There was no shape of comfort in the room large enough to fit what had just happened.

At last Akeno said, very softly, “I hate him.”

She did not need to clarify whether she meant my brother or Riser or the whole world of noble Devils that had made this moment possible.

Yuuto answered anyway.

“Yes.”

Asia lowered her hands slowly and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“Rias-Buchou…”

I had nothing to give her.

So I did the only thing I still knew how to do.

I sat in my chair at the head of the Occult Research Club and stared at the space where my servant had just been taken, and I let the room learn what helplessness looked like when worn by a [King].

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