The room sat in charged silence after Hespera’s departure, the air still crackling with the ghost of Akeno’s lightning. Rias watched her Queen from the corner of her eye, noting how Akeno had taken her seat again but how her posture remained rigid—spine straight, fingers curled tight against her lap, nails pressing half-moon indentations into her palms. It was the only visible crack in her otherwise flawless mask, that hint of pressure around the knuckles, but to Rias, who had known Akeno for decades, it screamed like a siren.
The others noticed too—Kiba’s blue eyes tracking the subtle tension in Akeno’s shoulders, Koneko’s white ears tilting forward with alert interest—but they said nothing. Devils, even those who were friends, understood the importance of keeping their own counsel. Rias made no comment. She understood that look, had seen it on Akeno’s face only a handful of times in their long friendship. Whatever Hespera had whispered, it had struck bone.
It was Koneko who finally broke the silence, her golden eyes fixed on the door with flat disgust.
“She’s annoying,” she said, the words precise and heavy. Her rounded white ears, however, betrayed more than her tone—they pitched forward and pressed close together, betraying sharp interest beneath her dismissive veneer.
Kiba chuckled, the sound warm despite the tension still hanging in the room. He crossed his arms, gaze shifting from Akeno to Rias, his expression sobering as he delivered his assessment: “Hespera Eveningstar is too unpredictable to try to create a close connection.” He said it carefully, with the particular caution of a Knight who had learned the value of measured words.
Rias exhaled slowly, her expression unreadable as she turned the statement over in her mind. “I still want to try,” she said after a moment. “There’s too many benefits riding on this.”
Akeno’s gaze remained fixed on nothing, her fingers still curled tight against her lap. Rias could almost see the words replaying behind her eyes—‘How’s little Baraqiel doing these days?’—each repetition dragging the anger back to the surface like a hook through water. Her knuckles had gone white, the pressure so intense the skin had lightened several shades around her nails.
Then, in a single fluid motion, Akeno forced her smile back into place—too sharp and too smooth, a mask re-fitted over something dark—just as Rias swept a hand through her crimson hair and redirected the room.
“As... intriguing as Hespera Eveningstar is, we can’t focus on her alone.”
Akeno’s reconstructed smile tilted, her eyes gleaming with something that made the temperature in the room drop another degree. “My, my~ Are you saying we should ignore such an... interesting girl?” she purred, her voice carrying that familiar lilt that made even Rias’s skin prickle with awareness.
Rias gave her a look that said she wasn’t buying it—not for a second—but she let it pass. For now. “We’ll return to Hespera later,” she said, her voice carrying that pleasant weight of finality. Then she dropped the name that shifted the room’s gravity entirely: “Issei Hyoudou.”
Koneko tch’d under her breath, her nose wrinkling with open disgust. “Gross,” she muttered, the word delivered with the flat certainty of someone stating an obvious fact.
Kiba’s brows drew together, his expression clearing with immediate understanding. “The perverted first-year?” he asked, already connecting the dots.
Rias leaned forward, elbows on the table, her eyes narrowing with careful consideration. “I sensed something from him earlier today,” she said, choosing her words with measured precision. “Not his aura exactly, but something suppressed inside him.” She tapped one manicured finger against the polished wood, her gaze drifting as she tried to articulate the sensation. “Something strong enough to register through its own concealment.”
The room shifted, energy focusing as four minds worked through the implications in perfect synchronicity. Akeno’s fingers traced idle patterns across the tabletop, her smile shifting into something more contemplative. “A weak, pathetic pervert who just so happens to be carrying something powerful inside him?” she mused, her voice lilting with genuine amusement. “How ironic~”
Koneko muttered “Still gross” under her breath, her expression unchanging.
Kiba nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement. “I could test him directly,” he suggested, already calculating distances and response times. “A small provocation, perhaps. Enough to trigger whatever he’s hiding.”
Rias considered it, her head tilting slightly. “No,” she decided after a moment. “Let’s observe first. If he’s unaware of what he’s carrying, we could trigger something dangerous.” Her lips curved into a thoughtful smile. “Or something that might get noticed by the wrong people.”
Akeno’s smirk sharpened with mischief, her posture relaxing by barely perceptible degrees. “If Hyoudou is unaware of his Sacred Gear,” she said, drawing out the last word with deliberate emphasis, “we’ll have to give him a little push, won’t we?”
It wasn’t really a question. Rias confirmed it with a slight smirk of her own, the two of them sharing a moment of perfect understanding across the table.
Koneko, having apparently decided the situation was settled, finished her snack with two quick bites. She licked the last crumbs from her fingers, golden eyes tracking the two devils with careful attention, then summarized the situation with characteristic economy: “So. We have to watch the pervert.”
Akeno’s smile deepened, her eyes crinkling at the corners as she turned to the smaller girl. “Oh, you might end up liking him,” she teased, her voice dropping to that register that made even Koneko shift slightly in her seat. “He’s very... dedicated to his interests.”
“Never,” Koneko deadpanned, her expression unchanging.
Kiba chuckled, the sound warm against the still-charged air of the room.
Rias leaned back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other, and rubbed her temple with a quiet sigh. “First Hespera. Now Hyoudou.” She shook her head, a strand of crimson hair falling across her face. “This school is starting to become far more chaotic than I expected.”
No one argued. They’d all felt it—that subtle shift in the atmosphere, the sense that the careful balance they’d maintained was tilting toward something less predictable. Outside the windows, the afternoon light was fading, casting long shadows across the polished floor of the clubroom. The candles flickered, their flames bending toward Akeno in silent recognition of the power still simmering beneath her skin.
And behind Akeno’s perfectly reconstructed smile, the question still burned, unanswered: what else does Hespera Eveningstar know?
The final bell released Kuoh Academy’s students into the afternoon, desks scraping and bags zipping as bodies swarmed toward the door with the particular urgency of prisoners granted temporary freedom. Hespera remained at her desk, her heterochromatic eyes—emerald on the left, amethyst on the right—glowing faintly as she tracked the Perverted Trio across the room. They hadn’t spotted her yet, too busy with their own whispered conversation, but that only made the moment sweeter—their obliviousness a gift she planned to repay with interest.
Issei, Motohama, and Matsuda—three names that deserved to be on her shit list for their spectacular lack of self-preservation—huddled by the back door, heads bent together in what they clearly thought was a private discussion. Hespera’s lips curved into a slow smile as she watched them, her gaze calculating, already mapping which arteries would be easiest to reach when the time came.
Her fingers tapped a slow, methodical rhythm against the desk—tap, tap, tap—each beat marking another second of restrained anticipation. In her mind, she was already running gleeful previews of the “little party” she had begun arranging for them. She’d been working on it since this morning’s introductory display, each class period a new opportunity to gather information, to manipulate events, to steer the pieces exactly where she wanted them. By now, everything was set—traps laid, probabilities calculated, exits and entrances mapped with careful precision. All that remained was the final execution, and she was looking forward to it with the particular delight of someone who had never quite grasped the concept of proportional response.
From twenty meters away, their voices carried with perfect clarity—and they were not even trying to be subtle.
“Dude, her tits are unreal,” Issei was saying, his voice pitched low but still perfectly audible to Hespera’s enhanced hearing. “That’s gotta be some kind of magic, right?”
Motohama pushed his glasses up his nose, his tone the particular affected gravity of a boy trying to sound smarter than he was. “Doesn’t matter if it’s natural or supernatural. The important thing is she’s stacked.”
Matsuda nodded with vigorous agreement. “Who cares? She’s hot as hell,” he added, his eyes drifting back to Hespera for what must have been the twentieth time that period. “I’d let her step on me.”
The pen in Hespera’s hand snapped with a sharp CRACK that cut through the classroom mid-conversation. The sound was so sudden, so perfectly timed, that several students near her jumped. The teacher—a thin man with a nervous habit of wiping his glasses—paused mid-sentence, his mouth still open on the half-formed syllable.
Hespera held up the two broken halves, examining them with a blank expression that made the nearest student edge away from his desk. She dropped the pieces into her bag with deliberate slowness, then resettled her chin on one hand with a slow, deliberate smile that never reached her eyes.
The teacher blinked twice, adjusted his glasses, and continued with his explanation as if nothing had happened. The other students returned to their notes, their attention smoothly redirected—none of them noticing the subtle pulse of [Nihility] that Hespera had released, nudging their perceptions just enough to smooth over the moment’s oddity. To them, the broken pen was nothing—a minor distraction quickly forgotten in the routine of class.
Even better, the trio hadn’t registered the incident at all. They were still hunched together by the door, their whispers growing more animated with each passing second.
“Bet she’s the type to act all cold,” Matsuda was saying, his voice dropping to what he clearly thought was a whisper. “But in bed? Oh man, imagine that voice moaning—“
The bell rang, cutting off whatever colorful description he’d been about to provide. The classroom dissolved into motion—bags zipping, chairs scraping, the sound of thirty teenagers making for the door with synchronized urgency. Hespera checked the time with deliberate casualness. A few more minutes.
Her blood was already singing, that particular heat of anticipation that made her palms tingle and her mouth curve into something just shy of a grin. She gathered her things with unhurried movements, watching as the trio shoved their way into the hallway, still talking with the same oblivious enthusiasm.
Perfect timing, she thought, watching the classroom empty around her. Just enough space to move without being noticed, just enough noise to cover her footsteps. She slipped into the hallway, her movements unhurried but purposeful, her eyes fixed on the backs of three heads as they made their way down the corridor.
They led her to an empty stretch of hallway—a junction where the east and west wings met, the space momentarily clear of other students. Here, they huddled together, voices hushed but brimming with enthusiasm, completely unaware that Hespera had positioned herself just around the corner, her back against the wall, one finger tapping her bottom lip as she listened.
“Dude, she’s the ultimate dream girl,” Issei declared, the statement delivered with the particular reverence of someone discussing a divine apparition. “Those eyes, man. Those EYES.”
Motohama pushed his glasses up his nose with the gravity of a scientist presenting groundbreaking research. “It’s not just the eyes,” he said, his voice dropping into what he clearly thought was a seductive register. “It’s the whole package. Perfect ratio, bad girl vibes, that way she moves...” He trailed off with a theatrical sigh.
Matsuda nodded, his expression dreamy. “She moves like a freaking lioness,” he said, then shivered dramatically. “Like she knows exactly how many ways she could ruin you and is just waiting for you to give her an excuse.”
The conversation veered into a detailed analysis of her heterochromatic eyes—one brilliant emerald, one haunting amethyst, both glowing faintly “like something out of a dream or a nightmare.” Matsuda admitted she gave him the shivers; Issei laughed and called him scared; Matsuda insisted he was just noting her “dangerous, ‘I might kill you or make out with you’ aura.”
Motohama nodded with the particular gravity of someone delivering scientific truth. “She’s like a boss battle in a dating sim,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of absolute certainty. “She could ruin your life, and you’d still throw yourself at her feet.”
Matsuda capped it with “Hell yeah. If I die, at least let it be between those thighs.”
The three dissolved into laughter, the sound bouncing off the empty corridor walls.
Around the corner, Hespera’s lips curled into a slow, anticipatory grin. She had already laid every piece of her web, steering them exactly where she wanted them without their knowledge—adjusting the timing of her movements, arranging “chance” meetings in the hall, planting suggestions that would bloom into decisions hours later. The invitation to the Occult Research Club, the scene in the cafeteria, the broken pen—each moment had pushed them one step closer to her chosen location, at her chosen time.
She pushed off the wall, her steps soundless against the cooling pavement, and opened a portal of swirling black-violet energy that swallowed her whole. Her last words, spoken to the empty corridor, hung in the air between heartbeats:
“Now all I have to do is wait. Hehe~ This is going to be so much fun!”
The corridor remained empty, the three boys still laughing, utterly unaware that tonight, she intended to deliver on that death wish.
Just not the way they wanted.