He was standing beside a dimly lit park fountain.
The details of his surroundings snapped into place immediately, locking onto the memory fragments from Issei's final moments like puzzle pieces finding their match.
But there was no time to process any of it.
Because standing in front of him was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.
Long black hair. Skin so pale it seemed to generate its own faint light in the darkness. A face so precisely, symmetrically perfect it looked like it had been sculpted rather than born.
Then his gaze dropped to the enormous black wings spreading from her back, and the cold, depthless gleam in her eyes — and every impression of beauty evaporated instantly, replaced by something that reached directly into the base of his brain and screamed danger.
Raynare — the fallen angel who had been posing as his classmate Yuuma — had her arm drawn back, a spear of light already formed in her grip, already moving.
There was a flicker of confusion on her face. She clearly hadn't understood why the boy she'd just run through was suddenly back on his feet.
Ethan's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Time stretched and compressed simultaneously.
He watched her wrist snap forward. Saw the spear leave her hand. Heard the air tear open with a thin, high-pitched shriek.
Every cell in his body screamed the same message at maximum volume:
YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.
MOVE.
MOVE RIGHT NOW.
His brain fired the command downward with everything it had. Dodge. Roll. Lean sideways. Anything.
But the body he was in — this ordinary high school body, untrained, combat-inexperienced, still reverberating from a soul-level shockwave — did not respond.
His muscles locked. His reflexes flatlined. He stood there like something had nailed his feet to the ground.
He could only watch.
The spear of light carved a straight, merciless line through the air and crossed the distance between them in less than a heartbeat.
Too fast. Faster than anything human eyes were built to track, let alone dodge.
"No—"
The word didn't make it out.
Thud.
A wet, dense sound — the specific sound of something sharp passing through something soft — broke the quiet of the park with horrible clarity.
The expected agony didn't arrive immediately. What came first was heat: a searing, spreading burn in his abdomen, like a red-hot iron rod had been driven straight through him.
Ethan looked down.
Most of the spear had already passed through him. The small portion still protruding from the exit wound was dissolving into scattered motes of light — but the wound it left behind was real. Black-edged, cauterized, devastating. A clean puncture, front to back.
Warmth flooded through his shirt. Ran down his body. Dripped onto the dusty ground.
Cold.
It came fast. Spreading outward from the wound into his arms, his legs, his fingers. A cold he couldn't fight and couldn't reason with.
His vision tilted and darkened. A sharp ringing took over his ears.
The strength went out of him all at once, and he went down.
Is this how it ends?
I just got everything. I just had a reason to keep going. And now—
This is ridiculous. This is insane. After all of that—
He forced his eyes open. Found Raynare through the blur.
His lips moved. Nothing came out but blood.
Through the fading audio of his own consciousness, he caught her voice — low, irritated, edged with the first hint of something like unease:
"Damn devils. They got here that fast?"
Devils.
Rias.
The thought arrived slowly, like the last light reaching the bottom of a deep lake.
Is it her?
Raynare's black wings shifted. Her hand began gathering light again, assembling a second spear. She wasn't taking chances — she wanted to finish this.
Darkness crowded in from every direction.
So that's it then.
And then — with no warning whatsoever — the park lit up.
Not gold. Not white.
Crimson.
A deep, spectacular, violent red that had nothing to do with any light source that should exist in a public park at night. It poured down from above like the sky had cracked open, rich with power so dense it was almost physical, pressing against the skin.
A magic circle. Enormous. Blazing.
Raynare's second spear flickered and died.
She jerked her head upward — and for the first time, her composure cracked. Her face went tight with something that looked, unmistakably, like genuine alarm.
"That magical energy—" Her voice dropped. "The Gremory family."
Ethan used what remained of his strength to drag his gaze toward the source of the light.
The crimson circle pulsed once — and a figure stepped through it.
She landed without a sound.
Red hair the color of expensive silk, long enough to move with her like something alive, caught the fading light of the magic circle as it settled. She was wearing the standard Kuoh Academy girls' uniform — but on her, it looked like it had been designed specifically for the purpose of making everything else in the vicinity look ordinary by comparison.
Her features were flawless in the specific way that felt effortless. Her green eyes, sharp and vivid, swept the scene with the calm of someone who had walked into dangerous situations often enough to find them mildly interesting rather than alarming.
Rias Gremory.
President of the Occult Research Club. Pureblooded high-class devil. Heir to one of the seventy-two pillars.
She took in Raynare first — a brief, cool assessment — then her gaze moved downward to Ethan, collapsed against the ground, shirt soaked through, a hole in his stomach that no human body was meant to have.
Their eyes met.
And Rias Gremory smiled.
Not a polite smile. Not a reassuring smile. Something warmer and more self-assured than either — the smile of someone who had arrived at exactly the moment they intended to, and knew it.
"It seems," she said lightly, her voice carrying across the silent park like she was commenting on the weather, "I got here just in time."
The sound of her voice reached somewhere underneath the darkness that was pulling at him. Something in it cut through.
Ethan opened his mouth. Closed it. There was nothing left to push past the blood in his throat.
The dark closed in.
He let it.
He became aware of sensation first.
Something soft and structured beneath him — the specific give of a quality mattress. Something light and warm above. The air carried a faint, clean fragrance. Expensive. Floral, but subtle, undercut by something that might have been cedar or old books or both.
Sounds filtered in slowly. Quiet. One set of slow, even breaths — no, two.
His eyelids moved.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was familiar in a way that took him a moment to place.
Right. Issei's house. His house — in this world, functionally his house — in the DxD world.
Memory came back all at once: the park, Raynare, the spear, the red light, the red hair—
I'm alive.
The realization hit him like a current. His mind sharpened fast.
He ran a quick mental inventory and carefully moved his body. He'd expected the movement to trigger agony from the wound that had been punched clean through him.
Nothing.
He reached down and pressed his hand flat against his stomach.
Smooth. Whole. Unbroken.
Like the park had never happened.
Rias had saved him. Healed him. And — based on how the original story went — she had reincarnated him as a devil, using one of her precious Bishop pieces.
I'm alive, and I'm a devil now.
A shaky exhale. The specific relief of someone who had made it back from somewhere they genuinely didn't expect to return from.
Then his hand moved — just slightly, just the small movement of having exhaled — and made contact with something to his right.
Something warm.
Something soft.
With an extremely specific quality to the softness that sent an immediate and very loud alarm signal directly to the front of his brain.
Oh no.
Ethan turned his head.
Slowly. The way someone turns toward a sound they very much hope they misidentified.
First: a sweep of vivid red hair spread across the pillow beside him.
"there is 25 advances in the P sit look in for my name
Then — following it down — a face so close to his that he could make out individual eyelashes. Perfectly still in sleep. Lips slightly parted. Every feature arranged in an expression of such complete, unguarded calm that it looked nothing like the composed, self-assured young woman who had stepped out of a magic circle hours ago.
Rias Gremory.
Asleep.
Right next to him.
The sheets had shifted.
And the section of sheet that had shifted revealed — with the ruthless specificity of someone determined to make his morning as complicated as possible — a bare shoulder, a collarbone, and a considerable amount of everything below both.
Ethan stopped breathing.
He looked down at himself with the rigid, mechanical movement of someone running a systems check they already know the results of.
His chest. His arms.
Also bare.
Every square inch of skin in contact with the open air.
And his hand — the hand he'd moved when he exhaled — was resting somewhere it had absolutely no business resting, palm-down against something warm and smooth and completely, entirely without any barrier between them whatsoever.
"…"
For approximately three full seconds, Ethan's mind produced nothing.
Not a word. Not a thought. Not a single coherent signal of any kind.
Just white noise.
He was lying in a bed, completely undressed, next to Rias Gremory, who was also completely undressed, and his hand was—
His hand was where—
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.