The white light faded.
On the dark red sand of the arena floor, a figure materialized.
Ethan's heart clawed at his throat. Every muscle in his body locked up. Blood rushed to his head until the edges of his vision darkened with the pressure of it.
He stared across the arena, his mind cycling through nightmare scenarios at terrifying speed: a Jedi with a lightsaber? A battle-hardened sorcerer mid-incantation? A martial artist built like a tank?
But the figure that emerged was none of those things.
It was hunched.
Barely standing. Swaying like a candle flame in a draft, like a single breath of wind would finish the job.
He wore a strange uniform — black, with elaborate decorative stitching, something like a high school blazer crossed with formal regalia. But the stomach of that uniform was soaked through. A deep, viscous crimson spread across the fabric, still expanding, still bleeding outward.
Ethan's gaze locked onto the wound and didn't move.
A hole.
A fist-sized hole, front to back, punched clean through the abdomen. Through it — through that awful gap — Ethan could faintly make out the dark red sand on the other side.
There was no gushing gore. The wound's edges were blackened, cauterized by something, some tremendous force. But life was visibly draining from that opening with every second that passed.
The other Ethan's face was the color of old paper. His lips had no blood in them. His eyes were unfocused, pupils already beginning to dilate — he was upright only through some residual instinct, or perhaps the momentum of the arena's forced transportation.
He tried to raise a trembling hand toward the wound.
His arm lifted halfway.
Then dropped.
His mouth opened. No sound came out — only a thin trickle of blood at the corner of his lips. His gaze moved with tremendous effort, sliding across the arena floor until it found Ethan.
There was no fight in those eyes. No hostility. No will to kill.
Only pain. Confusion. And something else — something hollow and faraway that Ethan had never seen in a living person's eyes before.
"This…"
Ethan's mind went completely blank.
And then — erupting upward through the blankness like fireworks — joy.
Absurd, unhinged, almost delirious joy, the kind that comes when something impossible swings in your favor at the last possible second. It hit him so fast that the whiplash made him dizzy.
His opponent was dying.
Not near death — at death. Teetering on the absolute final edge of it. A hole that size, through organs that couldn't survive it — short of divine intervention, this was already over.
Does this arena have some kind of matchmaking protection? Did it pair me — the weakest — against someone even closer to death?
The rules hadn't mentioned anything like that.
Or did I just get extraordinarily, absurdly lucky?
While those thoughts were still spinning out, the other figure's body gave a violent shudder. A short, wet rasp escaped his throat — and the last thread of whatever had been keeping him upright simply snapped.
He fell forward.
Hit the dark red sand hard, raised a small puff of dust.
And did not move again.
Ethan stopped breathing entirely.
He didn't move. Didn't blink. He stared at the body across the arena for what felt like several lifetimes compressed into a handful of seconds.
Then he saw it.
The body began to glow.
Not from any external light source. From within — from something deeper than flesh or bone, from every cell, from something that might have been the soul itself — soft, pure white light began to bleed through.
Faint at first. Then rapidly brighter.
The body became a dissolving light source. Skin, muscle, bone, clothing — everything that had made up that other version of himself came apart in the radiance, breaking down into countless drifting motes, like a swarm of fireflies ascending all at once.
The motes didn't scatter randomly. They gathered. Pulled by something invisible, they flowed together into a slow river of light — and that river turned, deliberately, toward Ethan.
He stepped back instinctively.
His feet didn't move.
The light wasn't harsh. It was warm, and carried with it a strange, inexplicable pull, like something recognizing something it belonged to.
He watched the first mote touch his skin.
No pain. No impact. Just a faint coolness — like a single drop of water absorbed by dry cloth — and then it was inside him. Not gone. Merged.
The second. The third.
The river of light wrapped around him entirely.
And then the flood hit.
Memories. Emotions. Knowledge. Experience.
A vast, crushing torrent of information — not his, and yet fundamentally his — tore into the depths of his consciousness.
He became someone else.
Or more precisely: he lived two lives simultaneously.
His own self — Ethan Hale, the ordinary man in the slice-of-life world — remained intact, watching from within. But layered over it, immersive and total, was another life entirely. Vivid as his own. Real as his own.
The other version of himself had landed in a different world.
High School DxD.
He had taken the place of a boy named Issei Hyoudou — and with that role came something extraordinary: he was the host of the Boosted Gear. The Crimson Dragon Emperor's Gauntlet. A Sacred Gear of the highest tier, housing within it the soul of one of the two Heavenly Dragons — the Welsh Dragon, Ddraig.
He had lived Issei's life from the beginning. Careful not to disrupt the story too much, he had moved through the plot like a sleepwalker — joining Kuoh Academy, forming the perverted trio, accepting the confession of a girl named Yuuma Amano, going on a date—
And then, in a park, Yuuma had run him through the stomach with a spear of light.
He had waited for Rias Gremory to arrive and resurrect him as a devil.
He never made it that far.
Two lives. Two sets of memories. Two emotional histories — coexisting in his mind without collision, without fracture.
The arena's rules seemed to ensure exactly that: the victor's consciousness remained the foundation, while the defeated's memories were added like new books to a library. Accessible. Searchable. But not overwriting anything that was already there.
Ethan slowly opened his eyes.
They were different now.
He looked down at his left hand.
An ordinary hand. Trimmed nails. Clear skin.
But sleeping within that hand — within that body — was a power so vast it made something in his chest tremble just to sense its outline.
The Boosted Gear. The Gauntlet of the Red Dragon Emperor.
One of the most powerful Sacred Gears in existence, housing the soul of Ddraig himself.
Its ability: Boost. Every ten seconds, the wielder's power doubles. Theoretically without limit — until the body simply cannot contain any more.
Secondary ability: Transfer. The accumulated power could be temporarily given to another person or object.
Its Balance Breaker — its ultimate form — was the Crimson Armor: a full-body manifestation of draconic power that pushed offense and defense into a realm where even gods could bleed.
This was a weapon that could let an ordinary man kill monsters that shouldn't be killable.
And now it was his.
A sound escaped Ethan's throat.
A single, quiet laugh.
It hung in the silence of the empty arena for a moment — uncertain, almost disbelieving, like he was testing whether the world would take it back.
Then it got louder.
And louder.
Until it wasn't a laugh anymore — it was something rawer than that, something that had been coiled up under weeks of terror and had nowhere left to go. He doubled over, hands over his face, shoulders shaking, and laughed until the sound of it rang off every stone tier above him.
"Ha — haha — hahahaha—!"
Between his fingers, his eyes burned with a fierce, almost feverish light.
Twenty minutes ago he had been dead certain he was the weakest player in this game. A rabbit among lions. Cannon fodder by nature of his starting position.
He had mentally prepared himself to die.
And then the universe had hand-delivered him a gift.
A version of himself who had landed in one of the most dangerous supernatural worlds imaginable, acquired one of its most powerful artifacts — and then been killed by the plot before he could use it. Sent here, bleeding out, practically dead on arrival.
No fighting required. No blood on his hands. Just inheritance.
The most well-wrapped, express-shipped gift he had ever received in either of his lives.
The laughter faded.
Ethan lowered his hands.
His expression had gone still. Calm. Perhaps too calm.
But in the depths of his eyes, three things burned together: ambition, caution, and resolve.
He crouched down and picked up a pinch of the dark red sand between his fingers.
Coarse. Cold. Faintly metallic.
"Issei," he said quietly.
His voice carried a slight echo in the empty arena.
"Thank you for the gift. Everything you wanted — everything you didn't get to finish — I'll carry it forward."
The floor began to glow again.
The transportation sigil spread outward beneath his feet — the same intricate pattern of light as before, but this time pulling him back.
Ethan stood up straight. He took one last look around the ancient arena — the tiered empty seats climbing into the void above, the dark sand, the place where the course of his existence had just permanently changed.
His jaw was set.
"I'll be back."
"Next time, I won't be the one who almost dies."
The light swallowed him.
Consciousness snapped back.
Ethan's eyes flew open.
He was still in his apartment entryway. Back against the front door, exactly as he'd left himself. The deadbolt still engaged. The faint smell of dust still in the air.
It felt like waking from a dream so vivid it leaves marks.
But he knew it wasn't a dream.
Every detail of Issei's life was there, sitting in his memory with the same clarity and weight as his own. And beneath the surface of his body — deeper than muscle, deeper than bone — he could feel it. Dormant. Patient. Immense.
A sleeping dragon, waiting for fuel.
And there was something else.
When he focused — when he turned his attention inward in a specific way — two points of awareness resolved in his mind, clear as compass bearings.
One: this world. The familiar, quietly haunted slice-of-life world he'd spent sixteen years navigating.
Two: that world. The one with fallen angels and devil clans and supernatural factions that had been clashing since before humanity learned to write. The world of High School DxD.
He could go there.
The arena's rules were explicit on this: as the victor, he had been granted unrestricted access to travel between his world and the world of the one he had absorbed.
Ethan's heart kicked hard against his ribs.
Not fear this time.
Urgency.
That world has a supernatural power system. A real one. One that can wake up what's sleeping inside me.
The Boosted Gear was an engine without fuel — spectacular in potential, useless in practice, for as long as he remained an ordinary human soul with no supernatural energy to feed it.
But in that world?
In a world saturated with devil power, sacred energy, and every variety of supernatural force?
That was where the engine got its ignition.
He stood in his entryway a moment longer, the city's ordinary evening sounds filtering faintly through the walls.
Then he straightened his jacket, exhaled once, and fixed his eyes on the middle distance — on that second point of awareness burning quietly in the back of his mind.
First stop: Kuoh.
Time to wake the dragon.