Kusari
Since Rias-buchou released one of my seals and gave me back two of my tails I’ve felt different.
More alert. More powerful. More aware of what had truly been taken from me.
I felt like a weight that was crushing me had been lifted off my chest. Letting me breathe easier and my heart to beat stronger.
After the release of a seal, and gaining back two of my tails, I had access to more abilities than just my Veli-Sight now. Fox-Glamour, an ability to use illusions more naturally as a Kitsune, and Misstep, an ability that allows me to move further than I should be able to.
As we moved, Fox-Glamour dulled the edges of the three of us as we moved along the outer wall it blurred sound, softened presence, made the dark carry us more easily than it should have.
Which meant stealth had become courtesy rather than a challenge.
Koneko-chan reached the side door first.
I touched two fingers lightly to the frame and let one weak mark sink into the threshold itself—not to trigger, not yet, only to cover our escape when we executed Rias-buchou’s plan.
Stillmark settled cleanly.
The cold beneath my breastbone spread outward more slowly now, a measured numbness rather than an immediate flare. The released seal loosened the restrictions on my curses as well.
Beside me, Issei-san flexed his left arm, as if feeling the weight of his gauntlet already.
He was trying very hard to look eager instead of nervous.
It worked from a distance.
Less well from here.
“Ready?” he whispered.
Koneko-chan answer was a look.
I said, “Enough.”
That got his attention at once.
Then I turned the knob.
The door opened.
We stepped inside.
The gym’s wide floor stretched out beneath dim white light, too clean, too still, too perfect to be our real school. The high windows held the colorless false sky of the battlefield space. The platform at the far end sat empty for one second—
Koneko-chan muttered “….Enemy presence.”
Before we could react further a woman’s voice rang out through the space.
“We know you’re there, servants of Gremory! We detected your presence as you entered
So much for courtesy.
It seems I would need to practice with my Fox-Glamour after having regained the ability.
Koneko-chan and Issei-san moved first.
I followed half a step behind and to the side as we came fully onto the court.
Four enemy Devils waited there.
The woman in the china dress held herself like a fighter who understood exactly how much of her strength lived in balance and impact rather than force. [Rook], then. I believe her name was Xuelan.
The twins should be Ile and Nel. [Pawns] each wielding a chainsaw, their posture loud even before the machines began screaming.
Mira’s face was easier to recognize than I wanted it to be.
The staff in her hands looked ordinary right until one remembered what it had done to Issei-san the last time.
Koneko-chan’s voice came cold and immediate.
“…I’ll take the [Rook]. Issei-senpai, the [Pawns]. Kusari-senpai, support.”
Koneko-chan was blunt and direct, especially now.
I nodded once.
“Yes.”
Issei rolled his shoulder and the gauntlet flared.
“Boosted Gear!”
[Boost!]
Power rolled outward from him at once, stronger than it had been before the camp and cleaner than it had been before Rias released part of his Pawn restriction. Not controlled. Not truly. But no longer only raw force either.
The enemy moved.
The [Rook] in the china dress crossed the court for Koneko-chan with the kind of speed that belonged to compressed power rather than lightness. Koneko-chan met her without hesitation, the first impact between them cracking across the gym like wood snapping under pressure.
The twins came at Issei-san low and eager, chainsaws grinding against the floor hard enough to send sparks.
One of them sang out “It’s disassembling time!”
Mira stayed just behind their line, not because she was slower, but because she was smarter.
I set Stillmark into the floor between the left twin’s first line and Issei’s blind side.
The sigil flattened into the wood.
Held.
Cold spread outward beneath my sternum in a thinner ring.
The left twin crossed it.
Her timing slipped by less than a breath.
That was enough.
Issei ducked the chainsaw instead of losing half his sleeve to it and drove his shoulder into her ribs hard enough to put distance between them.
Mira came in from the side at once, staff thrust angled for the gap created by Issei’s rotation.
I used Misstep.
One ordinary-looking step and the world rejected its own distance for me.
The shift dragged at my stamina immediately, a sharp, draining pull in my legs and lungs, but it put me just inside Mira’s line in time to slap her staff aside with the flat of my hand and send a testing streak of violet lightning at her hand.
Baleful Bolt wanted to be more than that.
I needed to test my new limits before I could turkey use it.
Only a sharp puncture of curse-lightning no more, enough to make her hand spasm and the strike break wide.
Pain answered in my forearm—a biting , sharp line instead of the old immediate lockup.
Mira’s eyes cut to me.
Recognition.
Annoyance.
Then she was moving again, circling wider now, which was exactly what I wanted. Every step wider fed more room to Issei’s line and less certainty to hers.
We didn’t need to defeat them. Only stall.
Across the court, Koneko-chan and the [Rook] hit each other again in a flurry of short, brutal exchanges. Koneko-chan was smaller, lower, cleaner. The woman in the china dress carried more mass through each strike, but Koneko-chan kept making that mass land into bad positions.
I marked one of those positions.
Koneko-chan crossed it a heartbeat later and her next strike landed harder than it should have, driving the [Rook] back on her heels.
She did not look at me.
She had noticed anyway.
The twins pressed Issei-san together.
They were far too cheerful while swinging their chainsaws at him.
Chainsaw left, chainsaw right, Mira driving thrusts down the center whenever his guard committed too fully to one or the other. The first days of the mountain would have gotten him butchered here.
The Issei-san standing in front of me now looked like the same idiot and fought like someone the mountain had finally begun to shape.
Not enough to make him an expert combatant.
But enough to matter.
I placed another mark on one of the twins. Enough to give Issei a better chance. I fired a bolt at the other one.
When the affected twin attacked, her swing went too high. The other twin had to back off as she panicked and used her chainsaw to block the spell.
The machine warped and stopped functioning when it was hit.
He ducked one blow from a chainsaw, twisted away from the second swing, caught Mira’s staff on his crossed forearms, then kicked backward hard enough to wind her.
[Boost!]
Blood marked one side of his cheek where a blades had grazed him.
He grinned anyway.
Idiot.
“Is that all you’ve got?,” he called.
One of the twins shrieked something indignant and came at him harder.
I laid an illusion in her path with my Fox-Glamour.
The illusion was subtle. Confusing distances and distorting Isse-san’s position.
Her attack’s angle dipped.
She didn’t see through the illusion and though he was blocking high.
Issei drove his gauntlet across her body and sent her spinning.
Mira lunged in at once to cover.
I saw it too late for a clean counter and too early to let it land.
Misstep again.
The stamina drain bit deeper this time, but the step carried me farther than it should have, wrong enough that Mira’s eyes widened just before I entered her space. My hand caught her sleeve, Fox-Glamour flickering over my fingers as instinct and technique met in the smallest possible lie: for one half-second I was where she thought I wasn’t.
Her strike missed.
My hand stuck at her elbow.
Not hard enough to disarm.
I didn’t have time to fully engage her.
“Left,” I said.
Issei-san heard it.
He moved.
Mira turned toward him and her staff dragged half a fraction slower than it should have. His gauntlet slams into her before she could recover.
He laughed.
“Yeah!”
He was gaining confidence.
The Boosted Gear flared again.
[Boost!]
Third boost.
His movements sharpened. Not graceful. Never graceful. But faster, heavier, more certain in the body. The twins’ chainsaws stopped looking like an impossible wall of screaming steel and started looking like individual attacks he could actually read through.
He ducked.
Jumped.
Turned.
Blocked Mira’s next strike.
Took a shallow cut at the shoulder and ignored it.
Drove one twin back with an elbow.
The other with a kick.
[Boost!]
Koneko-chan was winning.
Not cleanly.
Not without work.
But winning.
The [Rook] had begun trying to force Koneko-chan into a power contest instead of a precision one. That was already the wrong answer. Koneko-chan slipped under a heavy strike, drove both palms up into the woman’s centerline, and sent her staggering hard enough that I could feel the shift in the whole side of the court.
We were ahead.
That was the moment it all became easier to lose.
The twins reset together, one chainsaws whining, the other sputtering to life.
Mira came in behind them, expression colder now.
Issei-san grinned with all the shameless, excited pride of a boy whose new toy had finally become a real weapon.
[Boost!!]
“Let’s do it, my Sacred Gear-kun!”
I knew what he was about to do before he did it.
He had wanted this chance too badly for days.
My shoulders still tightened before I could stop them.
He entered another short exchange. He struck each of the twins, and then broke Mira’s staff and landed a hit on her while she was unarmed.
Issei gathered his demonic power differently this time—not for striking, not for raw impact, but in that thin, indecent line he had created when training with vegetables, perseverance, and perversion.
The first time I had seen that shape land on me, the world had vanished under it.
Now it existed three steps away and pointed elsewhere.
That mattered far too much.
“Take this!” Issei shouted. “My new ultimate technique!”
The twins came in.
Mira moved behind them.
Issei snapped his fingers.
“Dress Break!”
The wave left him narrow.
Controlled.
It hit the three [Pawns] exactly.
Clothes blew apart.
Outer layers burst to shreds in one impossible, mortifying instant, then underlayers went with them too.
The twins screamed.
Mira’s face changed from fury to utter disbelief and then to humiliating panic as she dropped low with the others, trying to cover what the spell had stripped away.
The whole fight collapsed.
I stood very still for one half-second after it happened.
Not because the spell had touched me.
Because the memory of it did faster than I could remember that it wasn’t me this time.
Then the present returned.
Three enemies frantically covering themselves and blushing.
Issei-san bleeding from the nose and laughing like a victorious degenerate.
Koneko-chan staring across the court with open, visible contempt.
“Ahahaha! How’s that!? This is my technique “Dress Break”! I created it imagining girls clothing getting blown away! I focused my talent on making a technique that will make all girls naked!”
Issei-san gloated with his hands raised like a cheap villain.
The twins cried out in outrage while covering themselves.
“You are the worst! You are the enemy of all women!”
“Beast! You sex fiend!”
Issei-san, the idiot that he was, actually puffed up.
“Yes! That’s right! I perfected it! Dress Break!”
He was proud.
And, infuriatingly, he had earned some of that pride.
I had asked him to master it and he had.
……I may have made a mistake.
Koneko-chan’s look of disgust deepened “....I misjudged you….”
Issei-san looked as if her words wounded him physically.
Buchou’s voice came through the transceiver before the scene could degrade any further.
[Ise, Koneko, Kusari. Akeno’s preparation is complete. Move according to plan.]
The room snapped back into usefulness at once.
I looked at Koneko-chan.
She looked at me.
Then at Issei-san.
He got it half a second later.
“Right!”
We ran.
Not through the side line where we had entered.
Through the central entrance where the enemy expected us to keep contesting the gym.
The three [Pawns] were too occupied with humiliation to stop us.
The [Rook] had only just recovered enough to understand what was happening.
We hit the exit at full speed.
Fox-Glamour spilled from me almost by instinct as we crossed the threshold, not enough to hide us, only enough to blur the exact line of our retreat.
A softening of the image of exactly where we were. Koneko-chan needed no help using it. Issei-san used it badly but successfully, which made sense as it was him.
One of them called out behind us “Are you running away!? This location is supposed to be a crucial place!”
That was why Buchou was throwing it away.
We cleared the gym doors.
The world flashed white.
Then lightning fell.
Akeno-san’s attack split the night open with a roar big enough to turn the whole battlefield into a single act of judgment. For one instant the gym existed only as shape and target. The next, it was gone—wiped out in a crashing ruin of shattered structure and burning air.
Even expecting it did not make it smaller.
My ears rang.
My tail lashed once on instinct.
Issei-san swore loudly enough to count as praise.
Koneko-chan stayed braced beside me, body low, expression unchanged except for the brief hard brightness in her eyes that meant satisfaction.
Akeno-san floated above us with a wide smile.
“Take.”
Grayfia-sama-sama’s voice came over the field.
“Riser Phenex-sama’s three [Pawns] and one [Rook] retire.”
The first phase had worked.
I let out one breath and only then noticed how slowly the cold from Stillmark had spread this time before fading. I could better feel how the seal’s release had changed more than raw power. Better. Sharper. Still expensive, but less punishing for each answer.
Issei-san turned to Koneko-chan immediately, grinning despite the blood under his nose.
“We did it!”
He reached toward her.
Koneko-chan moved away before his hand touched her.
“…..Please don’t touch me….”
The word was flat enough to cut.
Issei-san’s grin faltered.
I looked away before I could show a reaction to them.
Buchou’s voice returned through the transceiver, pleased in a way she had earned.
[The first phase is complete. Akeno will need time before she can use that scale of lightning again. Move to the next phase.]
We answered.
“Yes!”
Koneko-chan and I together.
Issei-san a second late and half hearted, because he was recovering from Koneko-chan’s dismissal.
The route from here was clear enough.
Regroup.
Move to the next contested point.
Continue.
That was the shape of the battle.
Then the explosion happened.
The sound hit first, flat and ugly and wrong. When I turned, Koneko-chan was already down.
For one impossible second my body refused to understand what I was seeing.
Smoke lifted from the place where she had stood.
Her uniform was torn.
Part of the ground around her had blackened outward in a circular burst.
Issei-san got there first only because he had already been moving toward her.
“Koneko-chan!”
I was only half a step behind.
Kneeling at her side made the shape of it worse, not better. The blast had hit hard and directly. Not enough to destroy. Enough to force retirement. Enough to rip open cloth and leave the body underneath marked by more impact than blood.
A new voice sounded.
“Take.”
I looked up.
A woman hovered in the air above us, wings spread, hood shadowing a smile that knew exactly what it had done.
The [Queen].
Of course.
“Fufufu,” she said. “The best time to take prey is just after it thinks it has succeeded. We can sacrifice more pieces in order to take down your smaller group. Even then, you won’t be able to defeat Riser-sama. You should give up.”
The taunting words barely mattered.
Koneko-chans’s hand twitched once against the floor.
Then she looked at Issei-san.
No—past him, at both of us.
“Issei-senpai…” Her voice was thin now. Too thin. “Akeno-senpai… Kusari-senpai…”
My breath caught hard enough to hurt.
Koneko swallowed once. “I’m sorry. I wanted to be more use to Buchou… and everyone…”
“No,” I said.
The answer tore out faster than thought.
She looked at me.
There was surprise in her face then, faint and fleeting, because I had never answered her that quickly before.
I caught her hand.
“No,” I said again, lower this time. “You did enough.”
Issei-san’s voice broke in over mine. “You don’t have to apologize! We were doing our job! Just wait—Asia can—”
Light wrapped around her.
Too soon.
Koneko-chan’s fingers tightened weakly once around mine, then the whole shape of her body began to dissolve into the forced retirement glow.
I leaned forward without meaning to, the word nowhere to go but into my throat.
Koneko-chan looked at us one last time—at Issei-san, at me—and then she was gone.
Grayfia-sama’s voice made it official.
“Rias Gremory-sama’s [Rook] retires.”
The air where she had been was suddenly empty.
That was the first impossible thing.
The second was how much space her absence took with it.
Issei-san’s hands remained where her body had been, fingers curled around nothing now, shaking with fury so obvious it almost vibrated through the floor.
For one second I could not feel the battlefield at all.
Not the [Queen] above us.
Not the next route.
Not Buchou’s plan.
Not the game.
Only the absence.
Koneko-chan had been too close at breakfast.
At baths.
In corridors.
On veranda steps.
In silence.
It was only a rating game. A match between peerages.
But the space beside me felt amputated.
Issei-san stood first.
Of course he did.
The rage in him rose all at once, hot and blunt and immediate enough to make his whole body look larger.
I remained kneeling half a second longer with my hand still stretched uselessly into the place where Koneko-chan had vanished.
Then I stood too.
The [Queen] smiled down at us from the air.
And for the first time since entering the gym, the battle stopped feeling like a match between nobles and started feeling personal.