The sky above the park had gone fully dark.
Rias Gremory stood over Kai's motionless body, her expression caught somewhere between surprise and genuine puzzlement.
"…He actually killed a Fallen Angel." She studied the trench carved into the earth, the scattered black feathers still drifting on the night air. "A Sacred Gear I've never even heard of. How completely unexpected."
She had been watching from a distance, keeping herself hidden—and even so, the power of that single strike had sent a chill through her. If that Sacred Gear were ever fully awakened, fully drawn out, it would surpass the vast majority of known gears without question. It might not quite reach the legendary tier of the Longinus—but it could hold its own against one. She was certain of that.
"With power like that," Rias said quietly, "you are more than qualified to be my Knight."
A smile touched her face—rare, genuine, the kind that softened the cool elegance she usually wore like a second skin. She extended her hand, and a chess piece materialized above her palm, crystalline and precise, catching the dim light.
"It seems I've found another one."
The piece flew from her hand and came to rest on Kai's chest. It began to sink slowly into his body, and with it, a current of demonic power spread through his veins—the beginning of the conversion, the slow remaking of a human body into something else.
Then Rias felt it.
The demonic power wasn't spreading. It was being consumed.
Something inside Kai was drinking it in—ravenous, relentless, pulling the energy away from the ritual faster than it could be supplied.
"What—"
She hadn't anticipated this. Not even close. The ritual was destabilizing. If it broke apart before completion—
She steadied herself. Breathed. The Peerage engraving ritual didn't fail without reason. There was always a cause, and if she found it quickly enough, she could correct it.
She watched Kai closely, tracing the flow of the demonic power through him, and gradually understood.
It wasn't being wasted. It wasn't malfunctioning. The power simply wasn't enough.
She recalled an old record from her family's archives—something she'd read once and never expected to need. If the potential of a chosen servant exceeded a certain threshold, the conversion could not be completed with a single piece. Additional pieces would need to be sacrificed to carry it through.
She looked at Kai, lying still on the broken stone tiles.
This man requires multiple pieces.
Rias took a slow breath. She didn't have time to deliberate. She reached into her reserve and produced another piece—a Pawn this time—and pressed it into place.
She had never combined two different class pieces on a single person before. A Knight and a Pawn simultaneously. She didn't know what complications might arise.
As it turned out, there were none—except that the hunger inside Kai didn't diminish. If anything, it grew. Whatever was absorbing the power had tasted more and wanted the rest.
"More?"
She pressed her lips together and added another Pawn.
Still not enough.
Another.
And another.
Kai consumed them all with the same indifferent thoroughness, like a fire that simply kept burning regardless of what was fed into it. Rias found herself staring at what remained of her reserve, doing a rapid calculation, and then making a decision.
She placed every last Pawn she had.
When it was finally done—when the ritual sealed itself and held—she counted what she had spent.
One Knight. A second Knight. Eight Pawns.
Ten pieces. In total. On a single person.
Ten.
She sat back on her heels and was quiet for a moment.
Any other King would have called it an absurd waste. A reckless gamble. The kind of investment that could cripple a Peerage before it ever got started.
Rias didn't feel that way at all.
Ten pieces meant ten times the resistance. Ten times the raw potential straining against the conversion. The math, as far as she was concerned, pointed in only one direction.
She exhaled, and the tension left her shoulders, replaced by something that felt almost like delight.
Kai's breathing had steadied. The conversion had taken hold. All that remained was to treat the wound, and he would make a full recovery.
She looked down at him for a long moment—at the set of his jaw, the quiet stillness of his face. The more she looked, the more certain she felt that she'd made the right call.
She activated the magic circle at her feet and transported them both back to his home, laying him carefully on the bed in his room. Then, with practiced efficiency, she drew on her demonic power and began the work of healing—removing what remained of their torn clothing and initiating the transfer of energy through direct contact, skin to skin.
It was the most reliable method. And with a puncture wound of that size—even accounting for Kai's newly converted Devil constitution—it was going to be a long night.
Waking up felt like surfacing from deep, still water.
Kai opened his eyes slowly and looked up at a ceiling he recognized.
His room. His home.
He lay there for a moment, assembling the fragments.
Right. The park. The woman with black wings. The spear through his side. The sword that had appeared from nowhere.
Did I die again?
He pressed a hand to his waist—and found nothing. No wound. No scar. No trace of the injury that had been bleeding him out onto the stone tiles an hour ago.
He was still processing that when the mattress shifted behind him.
A slender arm came around his waist from behind. Pale. Smooth. Unhurried.
Something warm pressed against his back—soft and close, the warmth of another person's skin against his own.
Kai went very still.
He registered, with a kind of distant precision, that he was not wearing anything.
He also registered, from the texture of the arm around him, that the person behind him was not wearing anything either.
A series of questions assembled themselves in rapid succession, none of them with obvious answers.
He turned his head.
The girl asleep behind him had long red hair fanned out across the pillow, her face composed and lovely in sleep, her lips slightly parted. The slow rhythm of her breathing carried a faint warmth that reached him even at this distance.
He recognized her immediately.
Rias Gremory. Without question, the most striking girl at Kuoh Academy—known informally, alongside Akeno Himejima, as one of the school's two reigning beauties. The kind of person who commanded a room without trying.
She was currently asleep in his bed.
In a state of complete undress.
With her arm around him.
Kai sat up slowly and looked down at her, his expression cycling through several things before settling on something unreadably neutral.
She was, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary. There was no deflecting that observation. Every line of her, every inch of her coloring—the pale skin, the deep red hair against white sheets—was arranged with the kind of effortless, unconscious perfection that made you feel slightly stupid for staring.
He stared anyway for a moment.
Then a more pressing question surfaced.
He had been stabbed through the torso, had lost a substantial amount of blood, and had apparently passed out in a public park. He had woken up healed, at home, in bed, with the most beautiful girl in school apparently unconscious beside him after what gave every indication of being a long night of something.
And he remembered none of it.
None.
He pressed his fingers to his temple.
Of all the things to have no memory of. Of all the—
He grimaced. Some opportunities, once missed, simply could not be recovered. The thought was not a comfortable one.
He reached out, placed his hand lightly on Rias's shoulder, and gave her a gentle push.
Her lashes stirred. Her body shifted slightly. And then, slowly, Rias Gremory opened her eyes.