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Two days after the sunset Issei spent in the forest park, the gates of Kuoh Academy opened as usual to receive the morning flow of students. Kaiju crossed the school threshold with calm steps, holding a freshly bought kinako bread in his hands after parting ways with Sylvie. He took a slow bite, enjoying the crunchy texture and sweet flavor, completely ignoring the bustle around him.
However, as he entered the main hallway leading to the classrooms, he noticed that the usual atmosphere was completely distorted. Matsuda and Motohama were surrounding Issei, making more noise than usual, shouting and waving their hands in the middle of the corridor with expressions of absolute disbelief.
Seeing Kaiju approach with his bread in hand, Issei, visibly agitated, eyes bulging and uniform disheveled, abruptly turned toward him. He grabbed him by the shoulders and threw out a question that detonated the tension in the place:
"Kaiju! Damn it, tell me you remember! Do you remember my girlfriend?! Do you remember Yuuma-chan?!"
Kaiju stopped chewing for a second. The brown-haired boy's hysterical insistence was beginning to exhaust his morning patience. He swallowed the piece of bread and, with a tone of deep frustration and annoyance, replied dryly:
"Yes, Issei. I remember your girlfriend. I saw her a few days ago with you guys. Stop shouting in my ear."
The trio's reaction was immediate and chaotic. Upon hearing the confirmation, Issei let out a scream that mixed panic with demented relief, grabbing his head.
"See?! I told you! I'm not crazy! Yuuma-chan existed!" Issei howled, pointing at his friends.
Matsuda and Motohama were not crying with envy like on Friday. They looked at him and Issei with a mixture of pity and strangeness.
"Ise, Kaiju... I think both of you are hallucinating from lack of female affection," Motohama said, adjusting his glasses with a condescending sigh. "Issei, you don't have a girlfriend. You never had one. On Friday, the three of us went home alone."
Matsuda nodded. "We should take you to the infirmary, man. You're making up girls in your head."
The relief on Issei's face turned into pure despair. He turned to look at Kaiju, hoping he would defend him, but Kaiju was no longer looking him in the eyes.
The duo's attitude was not a joke. Kaiju could feel it.
While the trio continued their noisy existential crisis in the middle of the hallway, Kaiju frowned. His spiritual senses detected a subtle but unmistakable anomaly in the air. He stopped paying attention to the shouting and focused his divinity vision directly on his two hysterical friends.
As he focused his mystical perception, the flow of reality before his eye became translucent. That was when he noticed it: a dense, viscous, residual energy of mental alteration wrapped around Matsuda and Motohama's minds. Someone had surgically manipulated the fabric of their recent memories, systematically erasing the girl's existence from the academy's conceptual map.
But the true surprise came when Kaiju shifted his gaze and focused his vision directly on Issei.
The young man went completely still. His pupils contracted with absolute coldness. The warm, earthly human Ki that Issei usually emitted—that Ki of an ordinary teenage boy—had disappeared completely. In its place, the inside of Issei's vessel was flooded with a dark, heavy energy of a vibrant crimson color that pulsed from his heart.
Issei was no longer human. His biological and spiritual structure had transformed into that of a reincarnated devil.
Kaiju clenched his teeth, feeling an icy irritation run down his spine. Someone had entered his city, altered the minds of students, and transformed one of his classmates without him noticing.
Without saying a single word, Kaiju dropped the rest of his kinako bread into the paper bag and put it in his pocket. He took a step forward, ignoring Matsuda and Motohama's complaints, and extended his right hand with imperceptible speed.
He grabbed the collar of Issei's uniform shirt tightly.
"Huh?! Hey, Kaiju, what are you doing?! Let go of me!" Issei shouted, kicking and trying to free himself from his grip.
But Kaiju's physical strength was an immovable wall. With a frown and an expression of total seriousness, Kaiju began walking firmly down the hallway, dragging the brown-haired boy along the floor as if he were a sack of potatoes. Issei's heels screeched against the polished tiles of the corridor, drawing the eyes of all the students heading to their classrooms.
Halfway toward the stairs, Kaiju's march crossed paths with the presence of the two most important Onee-samas in the academy.
Rias Gremory and Akeno Himejima were walking elegantly in the opposite direction, surrounded by their usual aura of mystery. Upon seeing the transfer student dragging the newly reincarnated Pawn by the shirt collar, both stopped dead.
Akeno widened her usual playful smile, though her eyes scrutinized Kaiju carefully, while Rias narrowed her blue eyes, fixing her gaze on the scarred boy. They tried to detect some trace of energy or magic in the aggressor, but Kaiju's Divine Energy Concealment once again worked perfectly, showing him to their radars as an ordinary human with unusual physical strength.
Kaiju did not even look at them. He passed between the two women with absolute indifference, keeping his firm pace as he climbed the stairs toward the upper floor.
Issei continued complaining, trying to scratch the hand holding him. Kaiju continued the ascent in total silence, crossing the access door and finally stepping out onto the academy building's rooftop, where the morning wind blew strongly, stirring his jet-black hair.
He threw Issei onto the concrete floor near the protective fence. The brown-haired boy landed on his back, panting and rubbing his neck, looking at the scarred boy with a mixture of fear and annoyance.
"Have you gone crazy, Kaiju?! Why the hell did you drag me up here?!" Issei shouted, half rising.
Kaiju crossed his arms, his single brown eye locking onto the brown-haired boy's chest with icy intensity. He did not know what had happened over the weekend, nor that Issei had died in the park, much less that he had been killed by his supposed girlfriend. For him, there was only one immediate reality that demanded answers.
"You're going to tell me exactly what you did over the weekend, Issei," Kaiju declared, his voice low and dangerous beneath the clear sky. "Because your body reeks of demonic energy, your friends' minds have been altered, and you are no longer a human being. Talk."
Faced with the sudden interrogation and the accusation that he had stopped being human, Issei's face went from anger to absolute bewilderment. He rubbed the neck where Kaiju had grabbed him, looking at him as if two heads had suddenly grown from his shoulders.
"What kind of damn madness are you talking about, Kaiju?!" Issei exclaimed, waving his arms erratically. "Demonic energy?! Not human?! I'm Hyoudou Issei! Yesterday I went on a normal date, with a normal girl, to a normal park! You're losing your mind!"
Kaiju did not flinch at his companion's hysterical outburst. Slowly, he crossed his arms over his chest, adopting an imposing posture that seemed to make the brown-haired boy look smaller despite them being the same age.
"Your ignorance is almost as great as your perversion, Issei," Kaiju said, in a calm voice loaded with crushing authority. "Since the first day I set foot in this academy, my senses detected things most students completely ignore. This school is not normal. It is infested with dark energies that, by any logical parameter, can only be classified as demonic."
Issei blinked, slowly lowering his arms, his anger giving way to genuine confusion. "What...?"
"There are two main sources of that energy operating right under everyone's noses," Kaiju continued, counting on his fingers without taking his one healthy eye off the brown-haired boy's reaction. "The first is in the Student Council office, led by President Souna Shitori and her entourage. The second, and far more powerful, comes directly from the old school building... specifically from the Occult Research Club, led by Rias Gremory."
Upon hearing those names, Issei's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
"Rias-senpai?! Souna-kaichou?!" Issei took a step back, shaking his head frantically. "No, no, no! They're the most beautiful and popular girls in the school! Why the hell are you accusing them of being monsters?! If this is a joke, it's in really bad taste, Kaiju!"
"It's not a joke," Kaiju cut him off sharply, his tone becoming harder. "And what's worse, Issei... is that the energy you were giving off until last Friday, the energy of an ordinary teenager, has been replaced. Now you reek of the exact same frequency of dark energy that belongs to Rias Gremory's circle. You are one of them."
Issei looked down at his hands, trembling slightly. Kaiju's words resonated with a strange weight. Blurry flashes of his date began to strike his mind: the park fountain, the sunset, the cold in his stomach... and a beautiful crimson-haired girl appearing in the darkness. But his human brain refused to accept reality.
"You're lying!" Issei shouted, clenching his fists. "Look at me, I'm flesh and blood! I don't have horns or a tail!"
Kaiju sighed deeply. The boy's denial was strong, but biological and spiritual truth could not be hidden. If words did not work, he would have to resort to more direct methods.
"If the energy now residing inside him is demonic, then it will react violently to its opposite pole," Kaiju analyzed in his mind.
Without wasting a second, Kaiju drew on his vast network of abilities. Using Energy Synchronization, an ability that allowed the wielder to adapt to and use different types of energy automatically, Kaiju manipulated his own core. He took a minuscule fraction of his inexhaustible divine power and, with surgical precision, converted and filtered it until it became pure, raw, radiant holy energy.
He raised his right hand toward Issei. A faint but blinding flash of golden-white light accumulated at his fingertips.
"I'm going to prove to you how wrong you are, Issei. And I'm warning you... this is going to hurt."
Before Issei could ask what that light was or try to run, Kaiju fired a thin wave of holy energy directly at the brown-haired boy's chest.
It was not a lethal attack, but a forced stimulus. Upon contact with Issei's newly reincarnated body, the holy energy acted like acid burning impure metal. The biological defense system of his new demonic anatomy instantly panicked in the presence of holy power.
"AAAAAAAH!" Issei screamed, falling to his knees.
He felt a scorching heat run through his back, as if his skin were being torn open from the inside. His shoulder blades tensed violently, the flesh gave way, and with a wet sound and a tear of his school uniform, two immense black bat wings sprouted from his back, spreading fully beneath the morning sun.
The pain ceased as quickly as it had arrived. Issei remained kneeling on the concrete, panting, eyes bulging with terror. Slowly, he turned his head to look over his shoulder.
There they were. Two demonic wings, tangible, real, and connected to his own nervous system.
"W-What... what is this?!" Issei stammered, his voice breaking into a terrified sob as he tried to touch his own wings with trembling hands. "W-What happened to me?!"
Kaiju lowered his hand, dispelling the holy energy, but his expression did not show even a trace of pity. He approached Issei, looking down at him with the implacable authority of someone who had destroyed things far worse than a teenager's fear.
"That is your new reality," the scarred young man declared, his voice cutting through the rooftop wind. "So I will ask you once again, Issei, and I suggest you remember. What exactly happened on your date? Did someone force you to transform, or did you willingly enter into a deal with the demons of this school? Talk."
The silence on the rooftop was so dense it could almost be cut. Issei, kneeling on the concrete with two grotesque black bat wings spread behind him, trembled uncontrollably. His human mind fought desperately to process the monstrous reality that was now part of his anatomy.
In front of him, Kaiju did not show even a shred of empathy. His brown eyes, cold and calculating, fixed on the brown-haired boy, waiting for an answer. To Kaiju, the names of clans, the hierarchies of the Underworld, or the laws of the factions were completely nonexistent concepts; he only understood the world through the raw reading of vital energy and the imminent threat of renegades.
"I... I don't understand it..." Issei stammered, bringing his hands to his head, tears of panic appearing in his eyes. "Everything was perfect. The date, the park... she smiled at me. And then... then she asked me if I would die for her."
Kaiju raised an eyebrow, without interrupting.
"I thought I had misheard... but she repeated it," Issei continued, his voice breaking as he relived the terror of that night. "Suddenly, black wings appeared from her back. Her voice turned cold. She made a shining spear appear and stabbed me straight in the stomach."
The brown-haired boy hugged himself, as if he could feel the cold of the phantom metal piercing through his entrails all over again.
"While I was bleeding out on the ground, she apologized and told me that if I wanted to hold a grudge, I should hate God for placing a Sacred Gear inside me."
Kaiju frowned. Sacred Gear? Those terms meant absolutely nothing in his tactical vocabulary. To him, they only sounded like cheap excuses from some supernatural cult or the delusions of monsters that hunted humans in the shadows.
"You were dying," Kaiju deduced coldly. "But you are here, breathing, and with a dark energy that does not belong to you. Someone intervened."
Issei nodded frantically, his gaze lost on the concrete floor.
"My vision was getting blurry. I was about to lose consciousness... but then I heard a voice," Issei recounted, clenching his fists. "And just before I died, I saw a beautiful girl with crimson-red hair appear in front of me. She told me that my life now belonged to her. Then... I woke up in my bed this morning, thinking it had all been a horrible dream."
The puzzle finished fitting together in Kaiju's mind.
He did not need to read ancient grimoires or know the history of this world to understand the raw biological reality. The red-haired leader of the Occult Club, that same girl who emanated overwhelming dark energy, had found him on the brink of death. She had saved him, yes, but the price had been transmuting the brown-haired boy's soul and body, infusing him with her own energy to bind him to her circle.
She had turned him into her slave, into one of her demons.
"Listen carefully, Issei," Kaiju said, crouching until he was level with his terrified companion's face. "The girl you went out with was not human, and she murdered you in cold blood. And the red-haired girl who saved you is the owner of the dark energy now running through your veins. You are a demon. That is the only truth."
"I-I don't want this! I'm a student! I want to be normal!" Issei cried, trying uselessly to push the wings back into his spine, gripped by panic.
Kaiju let out a harsh sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The boy was a perverted idiot, but he did not deserve to be dragged as cannon fodder into the secret wars of creatures that saw humans as mere Pawns.
"Calm down and focus. Force that energy to retreat, store it in your chest, and think of those wings disappearing," Kaiju ordered with authority, releasing a minuscule fraction of his martial intent to force Issei to react through pure survival instinct.
The brown-haired boy, terrified by the scarred boy's tone, shut his eyes tightly, clenched his teeth, and held his breath. Slowly, the crimson energy yielded and the black wings dissolved into small particles of shadow, retracting toward his shoulder blades until they disappeared completely, leaving only the torn holes in his school uniform.
Issei fell to his knees, exhausted and trembling, breathing with difficulty.
Kaiju stood up and brushed the dust off his pants, turning his back to look toward the horizon of Kuoh City. The situation had become complicated. The school was full of monsters, and now one of his "friends" was part of them.
"Go back to your classroom, Issei," Kaiju declared without looking at him. "Don't tell anyone from that faction that you discovered the truth, don't talk about your wings, and above all, act normal."