Rias Gremory could see, with reasonable clarity, that earning a genuine place in Kai's regard was going to be a long and patient project. He was one of those people who presented a perfectly approachable surface to the world—warm enough, easy enough to be around—while keeping the actual distance between himself and others wider than most would ever notice.
She didn't find that discouraging. People were shaped slowly, over time, and Rias had never been short on patience when something was worth pursuing.
The club enrollment was handled without friction. Rias passed the word to someone in the Student Council, and the paperwork moved. Kai was formally registered as a member of the Occult Research Club before the morning was half finished.
When they arrived at the clubroom, two people were already there waiting.
The first was Akeno Himejima—the second of Kuoh Academy's celebrated beauties, and a figure that commanded her own particular kind of attention. She carried herself with a composed, unhurried warmth, the kind that made people feel at ease and slightly uncertain at the same time.
The second was someone Kai recognized from his own class: Koneko Toujou. Where Rias and Akeno had a mature, self-possessed elegance about them, Koneko was something else entirely—small and fine-featured, with close-cropped silver hair and still golden eyes. She was seated with her hands in her lap, her expression perfectly neutral. She looked like something carved rather than grown; a flawless, quiet stillness that made her seem more like an ornament than a person, right up until you remembered she was watching everything.
Both looked up as Rias and Kai came in. Akeno smiled. Koneko gave a small, measured nod.
"You already know each of them, I imagine," Rias said, settling into the sofa and crossing her legs.
"We share a class," Kai confirmed.
"I've had everyone arranged into the same class. It makes coordination easier. From now on, they're your companions."
"Ara ara." Akeno turned her smile on Kai, warm and unhurried. "Please take good care of me."
"Likewise," Koneko said, her voice flat and even, carrying neither warmth nor coldness—simply a statement delivered at its exact required weight, nothing more.
"Koneko is my Rook," Rias continued. "Close-range combat is her specialty, and she's exceptionally capable at it. Akeno holds the position of Queen, which makes her the most versatile piece on the board. You'll be working alongside both of them, so it's worth getting acquainted sooner rather than later."
Kai took that in, then asked the natural follow-up. "And my position?"
Rias paused, and something in her expression shifted—not quite a smile, not quite wonder, but somewhere in between, as though she were still processing the answer herself.
"You're the most unusual servant I've ever converted, Kai. I started with a Knight piece, which should have been more than sufficient. It wasn't even close. In the end, it took two Knight pieces and every single Pawn I had to complete the ritual."
"That's ten pieces, in case you weren't counting," Akeno added pleasantly, looking at Kai over the rim of an imaginary teacup. "Which means Rias will have nine fewer servants than any other King. The weight of that is going to fall on you. Don't let her down~"
The cheerful delivery didn't soften the implication much.
Kai sat with it for a moment—the full picture of what had happened to him over the past several days assembling itself with new clarity. Died once. Transmigrated. Killed a second time. Revived as a supernatural servant with the combat expectations of nine people loaded onto his shoulders.
A lesser person might have found that distressing.
He exhaled through his nose.
"Fine," he said. "But before we get into any of that—can someone explain the full picture? Devils, Fallen Angels, everything else. From the beginning."
"Of course." Rias settled more comfortably into the sofa and began.
"Devils, Fallen Angels, Angels, Dragons, Yokai, and Humans all share this world. Most Angels reside in what's known as the Silver City, while Devils inhabit the Underworld."
The broad strokes weren't unlike the mythology Kai had encountered in his previous life. He filed the observation away without comment.
"Fallen Angels were originally Angels—beings of Heaven—who were cast out after giving in to desire, pride, or other impure impulses. Rather than accept their exile, they turned against both the Angels who remained and the Devils. The Angels of Heaven, for their own reasons, also engaged in conflicts with the Devil factions. This eventually escalated into what became known as the Great War."
"So both sides were coming after the Devils," Kai said.
"It's more complicated than that. But for our purposes—yes, that's a fair summary."
"Angels and Fallen Angels, and yet Devils are the villains in every story I've ever heard," Kai remarked dryly. The irony wasn't lost on him, especially given recent personal experience.
Rias laughed softly. "Not all of them are enemies. The world is rarely that clean." She glanced briefly at Akeno, who simply smiled and said nothing.
"The three factions fought for a very long time," Rias continued. "Long enough that all three were significantly diminished by the end of it. Eventually, a peace treaty was reached—an uneasy one, but it has held. Large-scale conflicts are rare now, though smaller disputes still occur."
Kai turned the history over in his mind. It wasn't unlike what humans had done throughout their own long record of warfare—fighting until the cost became too high to sustain, then calling it peace and waiting for the wounds to heal. Different powers, same mathematics.
He also now understood, clearly, why Raynare had come after him. It hadn't been personal. It had been preemptive. A Sacred Gear of that magnitude, in the hands of someone with no allegiance—that was a threat anyone rational would want to eliminate early.
He hadn't gone looking for any of this. He hadn't asked to be dropped into this world, hadn't asked to carry some inexplicable power in his chest, hadn't asked to get stabbed in a park by a woman with black wings.
But it had happened. And Kai was not, by nature, someone who absorbed a wound and forgot about it.
We'll see how that goes, he thought, and let the thought settle without pursuing it further—for now.
"The sword and shield," he said. "That's my Sacred Gear?"
"Almost certainly, yes."
"How do I call it up deliberately? I'd rather not wait for a near-death experience as the trigger every time."
"Once it's been summoned successfully, the connection is established. After that, it should respond to your will—you call it, it appears. Dismiss it, it disappears. You can try it now, if you like."
As she said it, Rias shifted her position on the sofa, drawing her legs up and making herself entirely comfortable in that particular way of hers that seemed wholly unconscious of—or entirely indifferent to—how it appeared.
Kai looked at her for a single, brief moment, then looked away and redirected his attention to the more immediate task.
He had seen considerably more than this that very morning. He was not going to be distracted by a sofa.
He turned his attention inward, reached for whatever it was that had answered him in the park, and focused.