Morning peeled itself off the rooftops of Kuoh as though reluctant to disturb the quiet. A thin light slipped past the curtains and found a desk with pen grooves and an abandoned eraser—ordinary artifacts of a life that would never resume.
The man who stood up from the futon was not a boy. He rolled a shoulder to test the joint, then turned his head to examine the line of the neck in the mirror. The reflection obeyed, but the gaze reflected was not meant for school corridors. It was the gaze of a field commander choosing a hill.
The red gauntlet lay dormant along his arm, a dull scale-glow under the skin. Inside it, a dragon shifted the way thunder rearranges its weight.
"You're going to pretend to be him," Ddraig said at last, voice like gravel sliding down a red mountain. No accusation. An observation weighed in talons.
"I will pretend to be no one," Aatrox answered, buttoning the uniform. "I will be unreadable."
"Readable enough for me," the dragon said, and there was a smile in it, the kind old enemies give each other before deciding if they will turn into something else.
He pushed open the window, let the air of human life enter: bikes squeaking, bread baking, crows discussing a powerline. Wards hummed in their invisible stitches beneath the pavement, and farther off he felt a shrine-bell's clean note drift over the hills from Kyoto. The city's magic accepted him with the indifference it offered rain: it would bend rather than break and hope the storm left before roofs learned new angles.
He walked to school among students who had mastered the skill of not seeing what frightened them. The barrier at the gate noticed him, a polite pressure—a dojo master's palm testing stance. He permitted it that much and no more.
From an upper window, Rias Gremory watched. She kept the curtain still with two fingers and smoothed the breath inside her chest until it obeyed. The boy's gait was wrong: too quiet, too exact. No restless energy, no adolescent bounce, only a balanced glide that suggested cavalry under the skin. Akeno stood a half-step behind her, smile applied like lipstick, eyes calculating lightning thresholds. Neither spoke. Names were fragile bridges; if they said his name too often, it might shatter.
Class was a ritual of sounds that humans called learning. Chalk hissed. Pages turned. People looked at the board as if the board could look back. He copied shapes with a pen Issei had bought at a convenience store months ago when coins had been heavier with milk and lust. The act of writing was a camouflage net big enough to hide a siege engine.
"You're wasting a battlefield to take notes," Ddraig said lazily.
"Scouting," Aatrox replied. "Their walls, their lanes, their alarms."
Lunch found him beneath a camphor tree that had stood long enough to memorize the town's wars and holidays. The leaves sifted the light into green noise. Akeno approached carrying two cups of tea whose steam rose in manners. She set one down as if the act could test a treaty.
"Hyoudou-kun," she said with soft amusement, like a violist warming a string. "You frightened Rias last night."
He tasted the tea. It was honest. Heat, leaf, water, no lies.
"I do not frighten the strong," he said.
"Mm," Akeno said, and her smile recognized a bluff even if it wasn't one. "The ORC would like to speak with you after classes. If you can make time for your… school club."
"My time belongs to me."
"Good," Akeno said, unoffended. "Then it won't be hard to lend." She left the cup and her perfume and a very deliberate silence. He drank to the bottom, set the cup back with the exactness of a soldier returning a borrowed blade.
Afternoon was a long exhale toward bell-metal. When it came, students burst from rooms as though bells unlocked doors. He did not hurry. The clubroom waited in the old building where wood remembered how to flex around winter. The door pushed back and then let him in, like an old warrior's handshake.
The furniture had been arranged to be welcoming but not safe. Rias behind the desk, Akeno at a teapot's elbow, Kiba composed at a casual angle, Koneko as a small monument near the armrest. A strategy in seating: no single chair offered a throne, every line of sight offered a flank.
"Thank you for coming, Hyoudou-kun," Rias said. "There was an… incident on our riverbank. I want to make sure our territory is stable. And that our students are safe."
The word our had three meanings. He acknowledged all of them by sitting without comment.
"The one who attacked me is dust," he said.
Akeno's hand paused a fraction pouring tea; Kiba's smile lost a tooth and then found it; Koneko's ear twitched and went still. Rias did not blink.
"The pressure last night," she tried again, as if she could pin it to a specimen board with a noun, "was not demonic, not angelic, not—" she glanced at the gauntlet "—draconic. What are you?"
"A weapon that spoke until it learned to speak too well," he said. "In another world I broke gods. Here I walk in a boy's skin because a winged thing interrupted my fall."
Her eyelids dropped half a millimeter, not to hide fear but to feed it something measured. "Are you an enemy?"
"I am not a servant."
"Then we're neighbors," she said, because a devil heiress could plant a flag with diction as neatly as with fire. "Neighbors who prefer quiet nights."
"I prefer useful ones."
The silence afterward was a negotiated border. Koneko's tail flicked once, as if to mark it. Akeno set down a cup without sound. Kiba nodded to nobody in particular, which is how knights keep their faces clean.
He left before questions thickened into alliances. Rias walked him two steps toward the door and stopped where a charm had been sunk into the floorboard long before either of them had been born.
"If something worse than last night comes," she said, "you tell me."
"If something worse than last night comes," he said, "you will not need telling."
He moved into the hallway, and the clubroom exhaled. Akeno arched her back like a cat and disguised it as a stretch. Koneko accepted a biscuit as payment for not punching anyone. Kiba finally let his sword materialize halfway and then banished it to prove to himself he could.
Rias stayed at the door, watching a corridor that had carried too many choices. "He doesn't belong to anyone," she said. "He might belong to the city."
"Cities break hearts," Akeno said, because lightning loves clear truths. "We'll be careful where we stand when he decides to love or kill it."
Evening gathered itself and lay across Kuoh like a cloak. He walked the river to learn how it moved at night. The water made water-sounds because water only knows one song. The ward-lines were thinner here and expected devils. Instead, three strays slid out from the boathouse shadow with the confidence of something that had paid the wrong tax too long.
"This is a toll road," said the thing with a woman's face and a rabbit's ears. "The Gremory look away when we pay. You aren't Gremory."
"No," he said, and let the word fall like a hammer.
They came for him wrong—too wide, too proud, too certain of their own hunger. He stepped once, and the gauntlet stirred.
Boost, the Gear whispered, a low mechanized hymn.
Strength doubled and tried to yank tendons that belonged to a human blueprint. He felt the strain but with it also newfound power.
He did not draw a sword. He drew a decision. The first stray learned what it meant when intent has weight; its chest folded in on itself without time for screaming. The half-souled man fell as if gravity had remembered him with interest; The rabbit-headed thing broke for a crack between realities that mortals couldn't see and Aatrox stepped exactly there—boot on the escape. The world declined to offer her an exit.
The river kept speaking oblivion. The Boost receded one interval;
"Good," Ddraig said, and the word warmed the gauntlet. "You have started to use the gear's power with more familiarity and experience you will be able to unlock the gear's potential"
"The Gear's potential?" He glanced at the water. A man could drown in a word that small.
"The Gear Hold many techniques: Boost, Transfer, and many more you will learn of them when you are ready" the dragon said. "Stack boosts, then vent them. Hit Transfer later. But you'll need to learn to breathe with the rhythm, not over it."
"Teach me when your curiosity burns more than your caution."
"My caution keeps you alive." The dragon's rumble was not displeased.
He didn't have to wait long for devils. Kiba reached him first, sword half-born and manner apologetic, which is how a gentleman says I came to help even though you did not ask. Koneko arrived eating the last corner of a cookie like payment for attendance. Akeno landed in a hush of hair and voltage. Rias came last, not because she wasn't swift but because leaders must arrive layered in conclusions.
They surveyed what wasn't there. Kiba checked for bystanders and found none. Koneko crouched to lay a seal on ash that no longer needed it. Akeno tilted her head and gave him a look that asked and answered a hundred small questions her mouth wouldn't dignify aloud.
Rias stepped beside him without entering his orbit. "We'll deal with the den," she said.
"I already did," he answered.
"We'll deal with the den," she repeated, and there was gratitude in it wearing a bureaucrat's coat. "And we'll reinforce the ward-lattice. You… should avoid this section while we do. Temporarily."
"I avoid nothing," he said. "But I will not be in your way."
"That's the same sentence if you say it with manners," Akeno murmured, amused.
They left as they had come: in a pattern that could become a formation at one word. Rias lingered the length of a breath. "Your power is… not ours," she said finally. "But if you keep killing the things that ruin our sleep, the town might decide you're welcome."
"The town doesn't decide," he said. "The children do."
She met that with a devil's smile sharpened by truth. "Then we agree who the city belongs to."
When she was gone he watched the water until the surface forgot anything had happened. The wards along the bank throbbed weakly, a pulse after a fever. He mapped where to push and where to let devils sew.
On a steeple, a Fallen agent decided not to test fences tonight. The report he would file contained the word unknown enough times to quiet promotions. In the Underworld, a sister's letter lay on a desk beside a teacup cooling toward commitment. In Kyoto, a nine-tailed fox listened to wind and heard a new consonant in it.
He returned to the small room that had memorized the shape of Issei's shoes and sat on the floor. The inner world opened like an eyelid. The battlefield hung under a sky the color of cauterized iron, banners torn to braided ghosts.In the gear Ddraig stood across from him, vast and watchful.
"Four boosts without tearing the host thats your body's limit for now" the dragon said. "You'll learn to ride three safely. Then we talk about five."
"And Transfer?"
"When your pride asks for it," Ddraig said, and that was a dragon's way of promising a lesson without cheapening it.
Aatrox opened his hand and watched the last thread of Darkin carapace recede beneath skin that did not belong to him. "If I take this body too far, it breaks."
"Everything breaks," Ddraig said. "The art is deciding when."
Silence is a forge if you don't leave it alone. They sat in it until the clock by the bed said midnight in a human tongue. He lay back without sleeping and sharpened.
By morning, Kuoh would have new patrol routes, two fewer strays, and a rumor too careful to have a name: something in a student's shape had walked the river and the river had lowered its voice.