Nothing about this was what Kai had prepared for.
This wasn't school bullying. It wasn't a honey trap or a shakedown or a few delinquents with a camera. This was something else entirely—something that had no business existing in any world he understood.
He could handle himself in a fight. Three, four people coming at him at once—he'd dealt with worse. But a woman with black wings and a crackling spear of lightning was a different category of problem, and Kai was not too proud to acknowledge that.
He didn't have time to wonder why she wanted him dead. That question could wait—assuming he survived long enough to ask it.
Running was the only rational move.
She'd chosen an isolated location to make her move. That meant she probably couldn't risk acting in front of witnesses. If he could reach open ground, reach people, he might buy himself enough time to think.
Kai had already clocked his exit routes on the way in—out of habit, the same way he always memorized terrain in any unfamiliar place. That habit was about to pay off.
"Explosive bomb!!"
He shouted it with total conviction, yanked his phone from his pocket, and hurled it straight at Yuma Amano's face.
The shout gave her just enough pause. She flinched sideways on instinct—and the phone sailed past her and cracked hard against the fountain's iron railing, shattering into pieces.
Yuma Amano stood there for a full second, staring at the fragments of plastic on the ground.
By the time she looked up, Kai was already running.
"…Pathetic."
She was airborne before the word finished leaving her mouth. The Fallen Angel crossed the distance between them in an instant, swooping ahead of him and cutting off his path. The spear of light in her hand came down in a straight, merciless thrust—aimed directly at his heart.
The wind screamed. The pressure of her descent hit him like a wall.
Kai felt it before he saw it—some deep, animal instinct firing at the base of his skull—and threw himself into a roll. The spear punched into the earth where he'd been standing a half-second before. The ground erupted. Stone and soil exploded outward, and the shockwave caught him mid-roll and hurled him sideways.
He hit the ground hard and scrambled to push himself upright.
The Fallen Angel didn't even blink. She was already in front of him.
The spear flashed.
Pain detonated through Kai's midsection—first a terrible numbness, then a searing, all-consuming agony that lit up every nerve in his body simultaneously. His mind registered it with horrible clarity.
He'd been run through.
He was going to die.
His thoughts moved fast—startlingly fast, given the circumstances. But he'd died once before, and whatever fear of death had once lived in him had been burned away in that first crossing. He didn't feel panic. He felt something sharper and far less cooperative.
Rage.
Dying for nothing, without even knowing why—that was intolerable.
He looked up at the Fallen Angel hovering inches away, close enough to touch.
And then he lunged forward and grabbed onto her with everything he had left.
"Get your filthy hands off me!!" she snarled.
She drove two hard elbow strikes into him. He felt ribs crack. Blood came up in his throat. He spit it out and held on.
His right hand found the fruit knife.
He drove it into her eye socket.
The scream that tore out of her was raw and animal. A shockwave of divine power erupted from her body and blasted him away like a ragdoll. He tumbled across the stone tiles and came to rest several meters away, gasping.
The Fallen Angel clutched her face, shrieking. She ripped the knife free. The wound was already knitting itself closed—but her expression had gone from contemptuous to something uglier.
She stared at the knife in her hand.
An ordinary piece of iron. Nothing more. And yet it had pierced her.
How?
Kai coughed and pushed himself onto his hands and knees. Every movement was agony. He could feel the hole in his side, could feel the warmth spreading beneath his shirt. His body was running out of time and he knew it.
But his eyes, when he raised them to meet hers, were steady.
He thought, with a detachment that surprised even him: I was reborn once. Maybe I'll be reborn again.
And then: Though dying like this, for this, without even understanding why—
That's going to bother me.
He sat back on his heels and fixed the Fallen Angel with a cold, level stare.
God had a strange sense of humor. He'd managed to survive one death only to be dumped into a world where He apparently couldn't even be bothered to send a proper angel—just a fallen one, here to kill him.
Fine. He'd note that. And if the universe gave him another shot, he'd remember it.
Across the park, Raynare felt something unfamiliar crawl up her spine as she looked at him. This man was dying—bleeding out, barely upright—and there wasn't a trace of fear in his face. Just cold, quiet fury.
It irritated her more than the wound had.
She raised her hand and summoned another spear of light. She'd had enough. She would reduce him to cinders and be done with it.
"Worthless insect," she said. "If you want to curse someone, curse the God who put a Sacred Gear inside you. That's the only reason you're dying here tonight."
She threw the spear.
Sacred Gear.
The words registered dimly at the back of Kai's mind as the light streaked toward him.
What's a Sacred Gear? She's killing me over something I don't even know I have?
What a joke.
If I had one, I'd be using it right now.
He watched the light come and didn't look away.
And then—
Time slowed.
The world went strange and quiet around the edges, the way it does in the moment before something fundamental changes.
Just as the spear was about to hit, something erupted from Kai's own body—a flash of silver-white light, sudden and fierce, appearing from nowhere and interposing itself between him and the incoming strike.
Boom.
The explosion threw up a curtain of dust and debris. When it settled, Kai was still breathing.
He looked at what was in front of him.
Floating in the air between him and where the spear had been was a shield—heavy, silver-white, dense with a solidity that seemed almost architectural. And resting against it, slanted as though waiting to be claimed, was a sword. Silver-white, like the shield. A large ruby was set into the crossguard, catching what little light remained in the park.
A sword and shield had materialized from nothing.
And they had saved his life.
"A Sacred Gear—!?"
Raynare's voice cracked. She stumbled back two full steps, her composure shattered, her eyes locked on the floating weapons with sudden, undisguised wariness.
Kai stared at them for a moment.
I actually have one.
Shame I found out this way.
He didn't spend any more time on the thought. He reached out, closed his hand around the hilt of the silver sword, and pulled.
Clang.
The ring of drawn steel cut cleanly through the night air, and with it came a surge—a wave of power flooding up through his arm, spreading through his chest, filling the spaces where his strength had been bleeding away. It wasn't healing. It was something else. Something that burned.
His eyes had gone red with pain. His hands were shaking.
He pointed the blade at Raynare and swung with everything he had.
The sword blazed. A column of light erupted from the edge and came down in a single, devastating arc.
Raynare's pupils contracted to points. She threw herself sideways—
—and couldn't move.
The pressure hit her like a physical thing, pinning her in place, crushing her down against the tiles. The divine energy woven into her clothing was stripped away in an instant. She felt the cuts opening across her skin, one after another, and understood with perfect clarity that this was not something she could simply weather.
"No—!! Lord, save me—"
The light swallowed her whole before she could finish.
The shockwave tore through the park in a circle. Stone tiles cracked and flew. A trench three meters deep and dozens of meters long was carved into the earth from the point of impact outward, radiating like a scar across the ground.
Black feathers rose into the air, caught on the disturbed wind, and drifted slowly down.
Kai leaned on the sword, his arm trembling, and lowered himself to one knee.
He looked at the trench. He looked at the settling dust. He looked at the black feathers still floating.
…Dead, then. With that much, there probably wasn't anything left to find.
"…Not a bad trade," he murmured.
The sword slipped from his fingers. His vision contracted at the edges. Consciousness was pulling back from him the way the tide goes out—steadily, inevitably, and all at once.
He heard footsteps.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
He forced his head up one last time.
A figure was approaching through the haze at the edge of his vision. Familiar, somehow. Before the dark closed in completely, he caught one last impression—a sweep of brilliant, fiery red hair catching the night air like a flame.
Then the world went out.