High School DxD: Fox of Ill Omen

Issei

When I woke up, my body informed me immediately that survival had been a mistake.

Everything hurt.

Not one part.

Not one clean injury.

Everything.

Ribs, shoulders, arms, face, legs, lungs, even the places I was pretty sure had only existed yesterday for decorative purposes.

The sort of pain that made lying still feel impossible and moving feel insulting.

I opened my eyes anyway.

My ceiling.

My room.

For one dumb, floating second I thought I had dreamed the whole thing.

The mountain.

The game.

Koneko-chan disappearing in light.

Yuuto-san’s swords breaking into silver fragments.

Buchou on the roof with Riser.

Kusari-san at the door, half dead and still walking.

Then memory came back properly and the pain made more sense.

Grayfia-san was sitting beside the bed.

If there was anyone in the world capable of making waking up from total bodily ruin feel formal, it was Grayfia-san.

“You’re awake,” she said.

That was all.

I pushed myself up on instinct and almost blacked out from how badly my body disagreed with that idea.

“Buchou—”

My throat came out rough enough to sound borrowed.

Grayfia-san watched me do a very poor job of remaining upright and then said, “Riser-sama won the Rating Game. Ohio-sama resigned. The engagement ceremony is already underway.”

The words hit harder than most of the blows I remembered.

I sat there breathing through it because there wasn’t anything else to do for a second.

Already underway.

Already happening.

My hands clenched in the blanket.

“Asia and the others?,” I said next.

Grayfia-san’s gaze did not move.

“Asia-sama stayed behind while the others went to escort Ojou-sama. Except Kusari.”

I felt something was off. 

“Where is she?”

“She has already been dealt with.”

That was not an answer.

It was the kind of sentence people use when they want something to stop being thought of as a person.

“Due to Ojou-sama’s wish, Asia-sama stayed here with me to take care of you, Issei-sama. She went downstairs a moment ago.”

Grayfia-san san still hadn’t answered what happened to Kusari-san.

And Buchou was about to be married to Riser. 

“Are you not willing to accept this outcome?”

“Even if the match ended, I can’t accept Buchou marrying that man.”

Before I could ask about Kusari-san again, the door opened and Asia came in so fast she nearly dropped the basin she was carrying.

“Issei-san!”

She set it down badly, didn’t care, and was at my bedside in the next second, hands already reaching for me like she needed to make sure I was really awake before the world could change its mind.

Her eyes were red.

That told me enough before she even spoke.

“You finally woke up,” she said, and then immediately looked like she hated herself for sounding relieved when everything else had gone so badly.

I grabbed her wrist gently.

“Asia.”

That was all it took.

Her mouth trembled and then she cried anyway, shoulders shaking with the effort of trying not to do it too loudly.

I let her.

For about three seconds.

Then I said, “Tell me everything.”

Grayfia-san stood before Asia could answer.

That, too, told me things.

“There is no time for a full report,” she said. “If you intend to do anything, you must do it now.”

She drew something from her sleeve and set it on the nightstand beside me.

A teleportation circle sheet.

My heart kicked so hard it hurt.

Grayfia-san’s voice remained as calm as ever. “The engagement celebration is being held in the Underworld. Use this and it will take you to the corridor outside the hall. There is another circle there that will bring you back when you are finished.”

I stared at the paper.

Then at her.

“Why are you helping me?”

The corner of her mouth moved by almost nothing.

“I am not,” she said. “This is from Sirzechs-sama.”

That made even less sense.

She continued before I could get lost in that.

“His exact wording was “If you intend to save my sister, barge into the hall.””

A beat.

Then she added, “He sounded almost entertained.”

That absolutely sounded like something strange for a Maou to say. 

Asia looked between me, Grayfia-san and the teleport sheet as if hope itself had just walked into the room without asking permission.

“Issei-san…”

I picked the sheet up.

The paper shook in my hand because my body still wasn’t done hating me.

Didn’t matter.

“Where’s Buchou now?”

“In the engagement hall,” Grayfia-san said.

“And Kusari-san.”

She paused.

Then: “She was removed.”

That wasn’t an answer either.

I looked at Asia.

She knew I’d caught it.

Her hands tightened together in her lap.

“Kusari-san was taken after the match,” she said quietly.

There it was.

The room went very still around the sentence.

“Taken where?” I asked.

Asia shook her head once. “I don’t know. Grayfia-san said she was being removed from the peerage. Buchou and everyone argued, but…” Her voice dipped lower. “She told them it had already been decided.”

I felt something cold settle under the ribs.

Kusari-san taken.

Buchou at a wedding she did not want.

The peerage broken.

Me asleep through all of it.

Not all of it.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

Asia immediately moved as if to support me.

Grayfia said, “If you cannot stand, then there is no point in going.”

That was probably meant to be practical.

It worked even better as an insult.

I stood.

Badly.

With all the grace I could muster, which was barely any.

But I stood.

“Good enough,” I said.

Asia made a distressed noise. “That’s not good enough at all!”

“It is for me.”

I reached for the first clean clothes nearby and started pulling them on despite the way every motion made my body complain.

Asia helped with the parts I pretended I didn’t need help with. Grayfia did not look away, which somehow made the whole thing feel more official and more absurd at once.

By the time I had my shirt on I felt less like a patient and more like a combatant.

A ruined combatant.

Grayfia-san gave a Kurt nod seeing me ready. 

“While you were asleep, I felt a dreadful power within you, Issei-sama. The Dragons were the only beings that didn’t form an alliance with either God, the Devils, or the Fallen Angels during the war. If it’s that power, then—”

Grayfia-san says as she moves to leave. She stopped as looked at me one more time before leaving my room.

Asia stopped me before used the circle.

She caught my sleeve with both hands.

“Bring her back,” she said.

I looked down at her.

She was trying not to cry again and losing.

“Buchou,” she clarified at once, then shook her head. “And… and Kusari-san too, if you can.”

Her plea hit me hard.

Not because it was dramatic.

Because it was so simple.

I put one hand over hers.

“I’m bringing Buchou back,” I said.

Then, because I knew exactly how bad the half-answer would sound if I left it there, I added, “And I’m not going to give up on Kusari-san.” 

Asia nodded once.

Then I lifted the circle sheet, pushed demonic power into it, and the world disappeared.

Kusari

They dressed me before they moved me.

That was the first indignity.

Not because being dressed was painful.

It was, but not enough to matter.

Not because I objected to formality in itself.

I had worn enough shapes in enough rooms to know how little cloth and status had to do with truth.

It was the precision of it that made it vile.

A formal servant’s black-and-white attire, cut properly for the Underworld hall and altered around the tails without trying to hide them.

My arm was rewrapped more tightly than before and fixed into a cleaner sling.

My hair was brushed.

The blood still on me from th match was cleaned away.

The effort made me look less ruined than I was.

That was the point.

To place me in the room as an acceptable object.

Not disordered enough to embarrass the house.

Not restored enough to imply care.

Useful.

The old word moved through me like a blade.

When the second summons came, I was brought not to a holding room this time, but to a private chamber behind the engagement hall. Sirzechs-sama was already there.

He had changed into formal clothing suited to the ceremony and the hall beyond it.

His face had not changed at all.

Quiet anger looked worse in noble dress than in other clothes.

Grayfia-sama remained by the door this time. Not absent. Witness.

Sirzechs-sama did not ask whether I had rested.

He did not ask whether I understood the change in my placement.

He looked at me once, took in the servant clothing, the sling, the tails, and said, “Listen carefully.”

I lowered my head.

“Yes, Lucifer-sama.”

“The ceremony proceeds,” he said. “My sister will submit to its outward form until interrupted.”

There was only one person likely enough to attempt that interruption.

Issei.

Sirzechs-sama continued as if he had seen the thought form.

“He will come,” he said. “When he does, you will remain silent. You will remain at my side until the proper moment.”

The room seemed to narrow around the sentence.

He was not merely holding me.

He was placing me.

“In public,” he said, “you are a servant in attendance. Nothing more. You will not move. You will not speak. You will not reveal my involvement to any member of the peerage.”

I kept my voice steady.

“Yes, Lucifer-sama.”

His gaze sharpened very slightly.

“If the challenge proceeds and Rias requires protection, you will provide it. If the peerage regroups, you will rejoin them then and only then.”

The words should have relieved me.

They did not.

Because they were still orders.

Because they still came with the shape of coercion inside them.

Because I now knew exactly what happened if I mistook temporary usefulness for anything softer.

Then Sirzechs-sama added the rest.

“If you disobey me,” he said, “I will not confine the consequences to you.”

The room felt very quiet.

Grayfia-sama did not move.

Sirzechs-sama continued in the same tone.

“If you act too early, if you reveal my hand, if you choose your own interpretation over the one I am giving you now, I will decide the next penalties with the rest of my sister’s peerage in mind.”

There it was.

Not the threat against me.

The threat against them.

Akeno.

Yuuto.

Koneko.

Asia.

Issei.

The names landed in my mind more quickly now than the old titles ever had.

Dangerous.

Still.

“Yes, Lucifer-sama,” I said.

The answer felt like swallowing glass.

Sirzechs-sama watched me for one second too long.

Then he spoke more gravely.

“I am taking a risk putting you back into my sister’s peerage. I have read reports what happened with your previous peerages and heard as well. I understand that you may not have been the aggressor, but I was not going to take chances when I removed you after the rating game.”

I kept my head down and waited for him to continue.

“I understand now that you are attached to them, to Rias, and they are attached to you. I don’t believe that you will harm Rias, but if you do I will act against all of them as well as you. Do you understand?”

“Yes Lucifer-sama.”

“Good.”

Grayfia-sama moved to reposition me only after he had already started toward the doors leading into the hall.

I followed when she indicated it.

There was no reason not to.

That had been made sufficiently clear.

The engagement hall was larger than it needed to be.

That, perhaps, was the point of Underworld noble architecture.

Great ceilings, wide marble, chandeliers, polished floors, all of it built to make power look inevitable.

Guests moved in formal lines.

Devils in evening wear and court dress.

Nobles pretending this was a celebration rather than a transaction gilded past the point of honesty.

Rias stood at the center of it in red.

I did not let myself look longer than one breath.

Sirzechs-sama took his place.

Grayfia-sama to one side.

I was positioned just behind and slightly to the left, visibly attendant and visibly silent, exactly as ordered.

I did not have to fake stillness.

The body helped.

Everything hurt enough to make stillness efficient.

My arm remained secured.

My tails rested low behind me.

Nothing hid them now. 

More than one noble guest looked at them and then at me and then away again with the sort of interest that made the skin crawl more effectively than open hunger ever had.

Let them think whatever they wished.

It did not matter.

Only the door mattered.

The room.

Rias.

The point where the night would split.

Then it happened.

Far off at first—raised voices, a stir in the corridor, then one voice louder than the rest because only one person in any world could make righteous chaos sound that much like himself.

Issei.

The hall changed shape around the sound before he even entered it.

Rias looked up.

Riser turned.

Sirzechs-sama smiled, faintly.

The nobles shifted in scandalized ripples.

And I—

I kept still.

Of course I did.

That was the order.

Issei came into the hall looking exactly like the sort of fool who would barge into a noble engagement ceremony held by one of the Great Maou and decide the room should rearrange itself around his feelings.

Bruised.

Battered.

Still standing.

Still mine in the sense that mattered now only because he belonged to Rias first.

He shouted for her.

The room erupted.

Guards moved—

And Yuuto, Koneko, and Akeno cut them off.

Of course they did.

Yuuto was in white formalwear, not soft, not decorative, but precise enough to make every step look like a drawn blade.

Akeno’s kimono moved like elegance deciding to become a warning.

Koneko was there too in a white dress, smaller and fiercer and exactly where she needed to be.

The peerage had come in around Issei in the shape they always formed when forced to become real at once.

No one looked at me.

Sirzechs-sama’s arrangement held.

Rias’s face when she saw Issei nearly undid me anyway.

Then Issei started talking and the room became impossible in a much more ordinary way.

He shouted for Buchou

He declared himself.

Declared Rias’s virginity his.

Declared the wedding wrong loudly enough that scandal became breath in the hall.

Riser’s face darkened.

The guests gasped.

More guards began moving.

And through all of it, I remained at Sirzechs-sama’s side with the tails lowered and the servant posture intact, while the rest of the peerage believed whatever they had to believe about why I was here.

Taken.

Placed.

Displayed.

Any of those were better than the truth.

Sirzechs-sama let the noise build exactly to the point of collapse.

Then he stood.

It was extraordinary how quickly an entire hall of powerful Devils remembered hierarchy the moment one man decided amusement had become speech.

He looked from Issei to Riser, and when he smiled, the whole room bent itself around the new mood instantly.

“This is an event I’ve organized” he said lightly.

There.

The shape of the challenge.

The theater built over the blood.

No one else in the room knew he had already arranged a second board under the first one.

Issei finally looked at me.

I didn’t look back.

Riser noticed him staring at me and made a comment about it.

Before Issei could get distracted by it Sirzechs-sama brought the conversation back on topic.

Rias looked torn between hope and humiliation and fury all at once.

Issei looked like he would happily accept any condition in any world so long as it let him take another swing at Riser’s face.

The peerage held the room around him.

And I stood where I had been told to stand and waited for the moment where obedience would finally become movement instead of suspension.

Sirzechs-sama continued speaking, the hall listening as if he had invented drama itself.

And for the first time since Grayfia-sama took me from the clubroom, I understood the exact shape of the role I had been assigned here.

Not prisoner.

Not servant.

Not even weapon in the simple sense.

Motivation.

My peerage wouldn’t be here just for Rias, they would see me and fight to bring me back too.

The Sirzechs-sama would have a piece in his sister’s peerage that he could control again.

Useful again.

I hated that I understood it.

I hated more that part of me was still relieved.

Because Rias was here.

Issei was here.

The peerage was here.

And if the board truly reset the way Sirzechs-sama was implying, then when the time came, I would step away from him and back into the shape beside them.

Only they would never know why.

Not tonight.

Perhaps not ever.

Sirzechs-sama’s speech moved toward its conclusion, the hall caught fully now in the pull of spectacle.

The guards had stopped advancing.

The nobles had stopped pretending this was only a scandal.

Riser’s eyes were fixed on Issei with irritation sharpening into something more serious.

The room had finally reached the point where rescue and entertainment were becoming the same public event.

I kept my head slightly bowed.

Kept my breathing even.

Kept a servant’s place.

Then Sirzechs-sama asked Issei what he would want as a reward.

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