While the Fallen could still employ the light, it did not love them.
And even if this disdain burned less than the hatred it heaped upon devil-kind, for those who once soared the heavens suffused with grace, it was still a form of torment.
That was why Raynare spent her day indoors.
Come night she would explore Kuoh, searching for the sacred gear hidden under the noses of the resident devils, but while the sun shone overhead, she was content to wile away her day within the dilapidated church her group had claimed as its headquarters.
Were one to come across the former priest’s office and find the raven-haired beauty lounging upon a tattered couch surrounded by ruined icons of faith, she would cut quite the picturesque vision of fallen decadence.
Patiently biding her time, not requiring mortal distractions such as television or video games or books to pass a few scant hours, less than a blink of the eyes to her immortal perspective.
In truth she spent the time mired in old grudges.
Coming up with emotionally devastating ripostes that could have ended arguments she’d come up short on in the moment.
A faint smirk showed on her fulsome lips as she imagined a holier-than-thou nun crumbling from having her oh so obvious in retrospect issues with parental abandonment brought up with a surgeon’s precision.
The delicious mental image of her composed grace shattering in despair was so pleasing that Raynare never even noticed the sounds of burgeoning conflict from elsewhere in the church.
The band of stray exorcists they’d brought along weren’t the most disciplined bunch after all, and so she’d already gotten used to tuning out a level of background noise.
What she couldn’t however tune out was the door being reduced to shrapnel by Mittelt’s elegantly gothic lolita attired frame tumbling through the air and crashing into the sturdy wooden desk at the far end of the room.
And now with the door no longer serving its purpose of muffling sound, the noise of metal clanging against metal became evident as well to her ears.
“We’re under attack?!” she surged to her feet, only a feeble groan from Mittelt answering her.
Swearing dark vengeance against whatever idiot exorcist had led devils to their doorstep so soon after arriving in Kuoh, she conjured a crackling spear of light in her hand and surged out into the nave of the church.
“Ahahaha, that tickles!” an unfamiliar voice laughed as Raynare was able to take in the scene.
Several of the exorcists were laid out, slumped over pews or ruined statuary, the remnants firing their guns to clearly no effect against… an angel.
Her blood boiled as she took in a luminous white-clad figure, wings of pure white fanning behind her as she weaved in the air to dodge a sword slash from Freed, the only one of the exorcists that was worth a damn in a fight.
Yet even as her fist closed more tightly around her light spear, a crackling feedback coming from it, she noticed inconsistencies.
One of her wings was shrunken.
Malformed.
It was almost pitiable, if Raynare was capable of mustering that emotion.
And though the stranger’s entire body shone in the shadows of their darkened church, there was no halo above her head.
She looked like an angel but wrong.
Some kind of chimera?
Or had an angel done the impossible and produced a half-breed without falling from the carnal prerequisite?
“And what are you, some dirty old flasher coat angel?” the intruder’s voice demanded as Dohnaseek rushed her head on, causing her to evade from Freed’s whirlwind of slices and flip in the air, a curious splash of white liquid spilling from a bottle at her hip and landing over Kalawarner’s exposed chest where the fourth member of the fallen angel cadre had been trying to line up her own surprise attack.
“Kyaah!” a curiously girlish noise came from the usually composed fallen as white liquid splattered down her cleavage in the sort of display that would surely be the stuff of adolescent fantasies.
Or grown men, considering how a few of the exorcists got distracted and looked her way, Kalawarner retreating and tugging at her dress, swiping her hands to try and clear the clinging white fluid off of her bosom.
“It burns!” “Hey, be careful, I’m not supposed to spill the holy milk!” their attacker, who shared the same blue hair colour as Kalawarner albeit in a lighter hue, shouted as she grabbed at the bottle in a panic.
Whether it was seeing a weak point, a hatred for all things holy, or simply a desire to be transgressive towards something that was not supposed to be done, either way it served as a target for Raynare’s wrath.
Her spear was flung forward with uncanny speed, striking the strange angel’s gloved hand with far better effect than the pathetic guns of the exorcists, even if not with the antithetical power it would visit upon a devil.
It was enough to explode the bottle, although the yelp of pain from having her hand struck wasn’t the sort of exquisite agony that would best soothe Raynare’s mood.
“Ahhh!
You’ve done it now!” retreating upwards towards the church’s vaulted ceiling, the animated sword that had still been holding Freed at bay while she dodged Dohnaseek following her up while white fluid soaked her chest and dripped down off her dress.
“I’m sorry, Head Angel!
Nanael’s a good girl, it wasn’t her fault, these bad fallen angels were trying to take advantage of her!” she wailed like a child, a brief pause in combat as everyone digested the seeming immaturity of one who had otherwise been doing quite well fighting solo against a cadre of fallen angels and a squad of stray exorcists.
“Nanael?” Dohnaseek repeated, looking towards Raynare in confusion that might have been mirrored by Kalawarner if she wasn’t too busy giving everyone a free show while trying to get the holy milk off of her sinful breasts.
They knew that name.
One of the Principalities.
One who’d been killed by devils during the Great War.
This was not Nanael.
“I don’t care what her name is, I just want to cut off that shitty deformed wing of hers and shove it up her cunt!” Freed contributed, vulgar as always.
Nanael did not like that, as her crying and pleading abruptly stopped and she glared down at the slavering exorcist.
“Ugh!
You’re all ugly and rude and disgusting!
If I’m going to the Underworld I’m going to punish you first!
Take my Falling Star Kick!” Flipping herself in the air, she then dove straight down at Freed, who let out an exultant yell and swung his sword up to intercept her.
Her armoured foot impacted the sword with a shearing sound of metal on metal, the two briefly frozen as effort pushed against effort.
Raynare started conjuring up another light spear to take advantage of her being a sitting duck, but suddenly Nanael spun her entire body like a drill, shattering Freed’s sword in a spray of fragmenting silvery shards and surging down the rest of the way to bury him into the stonework with a crash, floor giving way and crumbling into the basement.
Raynare didn’t stop her own attack though, a flap of her wings sending her surging into melee with Nanael, only for her floating sword to cut through the air, blocking her charge and forcing her to veer aside lest she be bisected by her own momentum.
Dohnaseek at least showed his own commendable initiative in diving in with his own attack, but didn’t achieve much more than slicing the skirt of Nanael’s dress as she righted herself and bounded back away from the fallen angels, completely ignoring the ineffectual gunfire of the exorcists that had stopped just staring uselessly but were still being fundamentally useless in a battle against something their church training and weapons had never prepared them to fight.
“I don’t know what kind of experiment you’re supposed to be, but you’ll pay for underestimating us!” she shouted towards Nanael, having to dodge back again as the floating sword took a swipe at her… one that elicited a hissing cry of pain as her wing was struck, blood and black feathers coming loose from her injury.
“Experiment?
How rude!
I am the angel of light, Nanael!” the mutant angel that had unfortunately been so far justified in her estimation of the fallen thumbed her nose at her.
“And since you’re a fallen angel, I don’t have to hold back like I would against humans.
Yes!
If I bring justice to you, Head Angel will have to forgive me!
So prepare yourselves, you dirty crow-winged rejects!” Cupping her hands together, an orb of light flickered into being between them, flickering and pulsing as it swelled in size.
And then it got a lot bigger from Raynare’s perspective before she found herself copying Mittelt’s earlier maneuver and taking a nice early nap.
— Nanael was having the worst day!
All she wanted to do was officiate some Queen’s Blade matches and sneakily get herself a harem of cute men to play around with, but no, Head Angel just had to scold her and tell her to enter the Queen’s Blade herself.
With a handicap!
She could win normally, but she knew Head Angel was just waiting for an excuse to send her to the Underworld for spilling that holy milk, it was all just some mean-spirited game for her!
So she got herself kicked out of Heaven, only to land cosied up to some gross fat monkey who was totally getting hard, probably because he’d never touched a woman before.
And then she got insulted by human women, turned down by a guy who wasn’t even that handsome anyway, and then she got ganged up on by a bunch of devils that must have been laying in wait to ambush her from the start!
And then after escaping that she realised she had no idea where she was.
The city below her didn’t look like any she’d ever seen before, with strange architecture and roads full wheeled metal boxes that moved around on their own.
She’d been a bit dismayed until she spotted something familiar up on a forested hill, stained glass windows and a graveyard outside, it was obviously a church.
The perfect place for an angel to regroup and scam the faith- er, receive a tithe, or something like that.
Only the church was a total dump!
Inside everything was falling apart, and there was a whole gang of fallen angels living there with their creepy monkey cultists that were all ugly looking and not handsome at all.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the bratty loligoth looking one had to go and make fun of Nanael’s wings.
Nanael was a good angel, of course she’d never hurt other angels even if they looked down on her and flew ahead to eat all the grapes without her because her wings wouldn’t let her fly as fast, but these fallen angels?
Well, she could work off some of her anger onto them, couldn’t she?
They didn’t have anyone to blame but themselves for becoming fallen after all!
But when all was said and done, she’d still spilled the holy milk.
Head Angel was totally going to send her straight to the Underworld.
Nanael’s dream of a harem was over… Not!
Because spilling the holy milk was bad, yes.
But a bad thing could be balanced by a good thing!
Winning Queen’s Blade wasn’t enough, that was only the expected bare minimum for a talented angel like herself.
But taking four loser failure worthless fallen angels, and whipping them into shape so they became good again?
That would be worth so many points, Head Angel would have no choice but to forgive her, in fact she’d probably get down on her knees and praise Nanael and make her the new Head Angel!
“Hey Flasher Coat, I see you slacking over there.
Don’t stop until those dusty windows are shining!” Yes, she’d have these misfits praising God again in no time!
Bringing this shoddy ruined church to rights with some good old fashioned hard work would be good for their rotten misguided souls.
“Nanael-sama, here’s the wine you wanted,” the blue-haired fallen angel had put on a sweater in place of her previous outfit to cover up the nasty red blotches left on her skin like an allergic reaction after the holy milk had spilled on her, but she was eager to please as she brought over a drink.
Supervising was thirsty work!
“Thanks, Turtleneck!” she cheerfully took the bottle and swigged it directly, a nice fruity taste and the pleasant burn of alcohol entering her system, putting a rosy hue on her cheeks as she exhaled a satisfied noise after the first drink.
That was the good stuff!
“Are we sure she’s not dyeing her wings or something?” “I don’t know, but honestly this is easier to deal with than if she was all sanctimonious and pure.” She ignored the whispers of the other two fallen angels from where they were patching up the hole in the floor her Falling Star Kick had drilled through when embedding that especially creepy cultist down into the basement.
He’d broken a lot of bones, so she’d let some of the other cultists take him away to the hospital for treatment, she didn’t really care about them anyway.
Apparently a magical healer who could fix him up quickly was meant to be coming to the church soon, but Nanael was happy just to get him out of her sight, even if he was less annoying when unconscious.
The fallen angels were tougher, and maybe she’d gone a little bit easier on them because they weren’t as outrageously rude, which at least meant they were fit to work after recovering from their loss and having Nanael lay down the law to them.
And even if she hadn’t found a friendly saint to help get her situated in this weird town, she could still get Turtleneck to tell her things while the others repaired and cleaned the church out of its currently sorry state.
“So those metal boxes I saw zooming around on the roads, what’s up with those?” she started with something inconsequential yet still puzzling, as a bemused fallen angel told her all about automobiles.
She’d never heard of anything like it, and she’d think someone was feeding her nonsense if she hadn’t seen them for herself!
But the confusion was reciprocated when she mentioned the Queen’s Blade tournament, and none of them had even heard of it.
It was shown around the whole world on giant displays in the sky every four years, how could you miss something like that?
Although now she thought about it, she hadn’t seen any of those floating crystal balls outside either.
She’d really landed off target!
But that was Head Angel’s fault, not hers, because she’d been the one to send her away.
Nanael was blameless, as always!
Also Nanael was bored.
Watching other people work was good for her soul, but in its current state the church wasn’t good for her mood, and there was only so much listening to someone talk about the world she could take without wanting to just go see for herself.
And hopefully see some cute guys.
So she decided to take a break.
And being a good angel, that meant she’d be giving one of her followers a break too.
Besides leaving all four of them alone to conspire without her watching over them was just asking for trouble, so she sent Turtleneck to help with the repair work and grabbed Spiked Shoulders to be her guide.
“My name is Raynare!” “I’ll call you your name when you start acting like a proper angel!” that shut her up, and the two departed the church, with Spiked Shoulders perhaps self-consciously losing those distinctive parts alongside the rest of her skimpy apparel for a modest ruffled blouse and skirt, the transformation completely changing her demeanour and briefly shocking Nanael.
“Wow, that’s a good start, you almost look like an innocent maiden out on a date with her crush!” “Idiot, it’s just a disguise,” Raynare scoffed, patting her own sides as her black-feathered wings shrank down against her back and then vanished like they’d never been.
“Now where’s yours?” Nanael just stared blankly back at her while floating limply in the air next to the woman standing on her feet like a human.
“Why would I need a disguise?” What followed was an explanation befitting of Nanael’s wisdom in enlisting a guide, that not only was this town the territory of devils in which they had to maintain a low profile, but that humans in general didn’t know about angels or devils or even magic, and so it was important that everyone hide such things when out in public.
None of that helped of course that Nanael for all her many skills and talents had never learned such useless magic as a way to hide her angelic traits.
— Unaware that their school had witnessed a supernatural battle this morning, three of Kuoh Academy’s most infamous students were setting out to make their own legend.
“Come on, hurry before they finish changing!” “Don’t try climbing on top of me, I want to see too!” “Shut up, they’ll hear us!” Clambering up the side of the dojo to where an isolated and high up window shone light into the girls’ changing room, Issei Hyoudou, along with his bosom pals (for they were united in their love of bosoms) Motohama and Matsuda, were scrambling to find a vantage where they could observe the luscious bodies of the girls’ kendo club in that uniquely vulnerable state as they transitioned from their school uniforms to their hakama.
“Uoooh, is that Murayama?” Issei whispered in glee at seeing one of his classmates just starting to shrug on her white top, a flash of well formed teenage curves seen before she tightened the garment modestly over her chest.
“Eighty four centimetre bustline,” Motohama shoved his head up under Issei’s chin so he could get a look too, adjusting his glasses as he catalogued her measurements.
“Biggest in our class, tenth biggest in the school.
Even among third years she’s hard to beat.” “Let me see!” a hand clawed at the side of Issei’s head, shoving him aside as Matsuda forced himself closer, the three boys competing for space where they could get a good look through the small window they’d discovered a path to.
Unfortunately for their energetic youth, all good things must come to an end as one of the girls of the kendo club glanced up and saw three horny teenage boys with grotesque expressions plastering themselves up against the glass, their panting breaths fogging the surface while leering eyes fought to memorialise every ill-gotten detail of the nubile bodies below.
“Kyaaaah!
Perverts!” a shriek of outrage as she ducked down, covering her chest, while other eyes swept upwards first in shock and then in bloodlust as the ones already most of the way dressed reached for their wooden swords.
The tricky to access vantage point was a trial for the three boys to reach in the first place, but all the more bitterly it proved a struggle to safely climb back down onto solid ground, their feet landing on the grass at the same time as the first members of the vengeful kendo club cleared the corner around the building to lay eyes on them.
“Don’t let them get away!” “Enemies of women!
Die!” “Every man for himself!
Run!” the three boys immediately started sprinting into the woods surrounding the school, rushing past the old school building with a horde of righteous kendoka hot on their heels.
But they could not outrun justice.
Reaching the walls around the academy only meant being cornered.
Pleas for mercy met with the cold retribution of tightly corded bamboo striking their bodies in recompense for every ill-gotten memory of undressed schoolgirl bodies imprinted into their brains.
And so with some final spiteful invective against the now chastised boys, the girls turned tail and stalked back to the dojo to do their kendo practice, now quite flushed and sweaty from their impromptu warmup, while Issei and his friends lay on their backs, bruised and sore, yet with spirits undaunted.
“Worth it.” “Totally.” “This is what high school is all about!” “Fufufu, what high spirited boys!” a rather more friendly female voice interrupted their attempts to find meaning in what had just transpired, their eyes all pivoting to see a pair of women approaching.
One a demure dark-haired beauty in a cute blouse and skirt combo, the other rather mysteriously wearing a white hooded cloak over her shoulders, which did not hide her mischievous gaze nor her bright blue hair.
Nor the polka dot print patterned panties the supine boys could see up her breezy white dress as she came closer.
“Polka dots… nice…” Issei murmured, smiling despite the twinge of pain from where Murayama’s shinai had clocked his jaw despite earlier pleas to avoid the face.
“Eighty four centimetres… and… ninety one,” Motohama’s glasses shone in the light as he adjusted them while peering up at the mysterious girls.
The blue-haired one briefly shot an annoyed look at her companion before plastering her smile back on, “Yes!
Well, you’ve got a good eye for detail, I can tell!
And not bad looking either… well, the bald look isn’t cute on that one, but that’s a nice fit body.
How’d you boys like to come with us, and… have some bedroom fun?” she licked her lips, and the three infamous perverts could only stare back in stupefied silence, utterly unprepared for a girl to ever actually approach them after an adolescence spent engaging in woman-repelling behaviour guided by hyperactive libidos.
Then they started shouting and grabbing at her feet and even if it was a completely pathetic display, the girl only smiled at it like she had the patience of an angel.
Or the ego of a monster.