Autumn had arrived in Kuoh City, painting the park trees in shades of copper and gold. For the young manager of the Saturn convenience store, the changing of the seasons meant only one thing: he had survived another month.
Akeno had been missing for four weeks now. At first, her absence had left a painful void in the back room, a silence that the hum of the refrigerators couldn't fill. However, his survival instinct had taken over again. He had buried the sadness under mountains of work. He extended the store's hours, added new products to the shelves, and doubled his shifts. Every time the ghost of the violet-eyed girl crossed his mind, he looked at the safe and counted the bills. "I couldn't save her," he repeated to himself, "but I'll save my own. I'm coming back."
It was the last Friday of the month. The day of the ritual.
Sitting at the counter, the shop empty under the pale light of dawn, he prepared the manila envelope. His hands, now rough from manual labor, caressed the paper with devotion. He inserted a much larger amount of yen than usual; business had been good. He wrote the address with military precision. His country, his city, his street, the postal code, his mother's name. He sealed the envelope, kissed it briefly, and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.
That morning, he decided not to use the mailbox on the street. He wanted to ensure that this shipment, being the largest to date, was registered. He walked to the main post office in Kuoh. The cold air stung his face, but he felt an unyielding warmth in his chest, just beneath the strange black glass the previous owner had given him and which he never removed.
As he entered, the smell of old paper, glue, and cheap coffee overwhelmed his senses. He took a number and waited patiently for his turn, ignoring the television broadcasting the morning news.
When he reached the counter, he was greeted by an older clerk with thick glasses and a bored expression.
"Good morning. International mail, registered, please," the young man said in his broken but functional Japanese, sliding the thick manila envelope through the window.
The clerk nodded mechanically. He took the envelope, typed something into his old computer, and waited. He frowned. He typed again. The machine buzzed with an error.
"Excuse me, customer..." the man murmured, adjusting his glasses. "Could you please verify the postal code? The machine says it's invalid."
"No, it's correct. I always send it there," the young man replied, feeling a slight annoyance. Stupid old machines.
The clerk sighed and called over a supervisor, a younger man in a postal service vest. The supervisor took the envelope, glanced at the handwritten address, and then at the screen. His eyes widened in surprise before he looked at the young foreigner.
"Sir… this address doesn't exist," the supervisor said slowly, assuming the foreigner didn't understand the language well.
"What? Of course it exists. It's my home. My country."
The supervisor turned the monitor toward him. He pointed to a global map of the postal system.
"The country exists, yes. But the city, the postal code, this street… none of this is registered in the international database. It's as if… I were inventing a place from a fantasy book, sir. We can't send money to a nonexistent address."
The young man felt the ground shift beneath his feet. A dull ringing began to grow in his ears.
"You're mistaken. I've sent letters before. I've sent them from mailboxes on the street." "They're here!" His voice rose, drawing the attention of the other customers.
The supervisor looked at him with a mixture of pity and concern. He asked him to wait a moment and disappeared into the back of the office. When he returned, he was carrying a clear plastic box. He placed it on the counter.
The young man's heart stopped.
Inside the box were every single envelope he had mailed over the past few months. They were dirty, some crumpled, and all had a large red stamp across the front: "RETURN TO SENDER / ADDRESS UNKNOWN." Because he hadn't provided a clear return address to avoid being tracked by immigration, the post office had simply stored them in lost and found.
"We thought it was some student prank…" the supervisor muttered. "I'm so sorry, sir."
The young man didn't hear the rest. He grabbed the box, placed the new envelope on the counter, and ran out of the post office. The cold air hit him like a brick wall, but he didn't feel it. He couldn't breathe. No. No. No. It's a mistake. It's this damned country, its system is garbage. They must be wrong.
He needed proof. He needed to see the streets of his city, he needed to see his sister's face on social media.
He ran along the sidewalks, pushing past passersby, until he found a "Manga Kissa," a dark and smelly internet café. He paid for an hour in advance, tossing the yen to the attendant, and locked himself in a tiny booth lit only by the blue glow of the monitor. His fingers trembled violently on the keyboard as he changed the language settings.
He opened Google Maps. He typed in the name of his street.
"Loading..."
"No results found."
"It's the spelling..." he stammered, his breath ragged and beads of cold sweat trickling down his forehead. He typed in the name of his hometown. The map took him to a similar geographical area, but the names of the avenues, the parks, the monuments... everything was wrong. It was like looking into a parallel universe. His old school wasn't there. The park where he used to play with his brother wasn't there either.
In despair, he opened a new tab. He typed his mother's full name into the search engine.
News articles, random people, phone directories... None of them were her.
He searched for his sister, he searched for the name of the university she attended. Nothing.
Finally, in an act of pure agony, he typed his own full name.
"Maybe there's a missing person report... maybe the government is looking for me..."
He pressed Enter. The screen returned a few vague matches of people on other continents who shared his last name, but there was no news. No missing person alert. No Facebook profile. No trace that the twenty-one-year-old who had been reading in his bed one rainy night had ever existed.
He was a ghost in a world that wasn't his own.
He leaned back in the cheap leather chair. The ringing in his ears had become a deafening roar. His breathing became erratic, almost as if he were having an asthma attack. He staggered out of the internet café, bumping into the walls.
The streets of Kuoh seemed to have warped. The neon signs flickered mockingly. The voices of the people around him sounded like underwater echoes.
He didn't know how he got back to the Saturn.
He opened the glass door, triggering the cheerful electronic buzzer that had once brought him peace. Now it sounded like a macabre mockery. He looked at the perfectly ordered shelves, the clean floors, the safe in the back room filled with worthless money. He had worked himself to the bone. He had begged, humiliated himself, pushed away his pain, all for a goal that was never real.
Something inside him, the last pillar of sanity holding up his human mind, cracked and snapped.
A bestial, heart-rending scream erupted from the back of his throat. It wasn't a cry, it was a howl of pure, unadulterated rage.
He grabbed a baseball bat he kept behind the counter for emergencies and smashed it against the cash register. Plastic and metal exploded, scattering coins across the linoleum.
"LIES!" he roared, shattering the glass of the refrigerators. Drinks cascaded onto the floor in colorful waterfalls, mingling with the broken glass.
With each blow, a part of his humanity died. He smashed the magazine racks, kicked the food displays, and tore posters from the walls with his bare hands, not caring that the sharp edges cut his palms.
"IT WAS ALL A LIE! GIVE THEM BACK! GIVE ME BACK LIFE!"
He destroyed his empire of survival until nothing remained but a wasteland of ruins, stagnant water, and blood. The Saturn Mini-Mart was gone; now it was the graveyard of his hopes.
Gasping heavily, covered in sweat, tears, and superficial cuts, he dropped the bat. He fell to his knees near the broken window overlooking the street. His chest heaved violently.
Outside, life went on, oblivious to his suffering. Across the street, in a small sandpit, two small figures scampered about.
His eyes, empty and bloodshot, focused on the scene out of pure instinct.
They were two children. They couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old. One was a boy with messy brown hair, running and laughing with a wooden stick in his hand. The other was a very energetic girl, her hair tied in two pigtails, jumping after him, pretending to have an invisible sword.
"Wait, Issei-kun! Evil cannot escape the warrior of God!" the girl shouted in cheerful, childlike Japanese, striking an exaggerated pose.
The brown-haired boy stopped, laughing loudly. "You're not going to catch me, Irina-chan! I'm too fast!"
Issei.
Irina.
The young manager froze. The cold wind rushing in through the broken window hit his face. The dam in his mind, the one he had meticulously built with bricks of denial and hard work, suddenly gave way. The puzzle pieces his brain had ignored out of instinct for survival fell into place with uncanny precision.
The violet-eyed, black-haired girl he'd hidden from assassins in suits... Akeno Himejima. The strange red lights in the night sky. The people with black wings he'd thought were cosplayers. The late-night customers who smelled of blood. The city's name... Kuoh.
It all clicked. He wasn't on another continent. He wasn't simply lost in a foreign country. He'd been thrown into a work of fiction, a damn anime he'd devoured years ago in a life that no longer existed. His home, his mother, his sister, his younger brother... they weren't across the ocean. They were on the other side of an insurmountable dimensional barrier.
He dropped the baseball bat, which rolled across the floor covered in broken glass and spilled drinks. Without a word, the young man turned and left the Saturn convenience store. He left behind the money, the safe, the food, and his ephemeral empire of survival. He didn't care anymore. He walked through the broken door and into the streets.
The sky, which had been threatening a storm all morning, finally broke. A torrential, freezing rain began to pour down on Kuoh. The drops stung his face, soaking his clothes and washing the dried blood from his bruised knuckles, but he felt nothing. He felt nothing. He walked like a living corpse, his arms hanging limply at his sides, occasionally stumbling over the edges of the sidewalks. Passersby with umbrellas skirted around him, muttering complaints about the "morning drunk," completely oblivious to the human tragedy unfolding before them.
His feet, guided by a macabre, subconscious instinct, led him to the place where his entire nightmare had begun.
The old park.
There it was. The same wooden bench, now darkened by the rain, where he had woken up months ago shivering with cold, half-naked, and terrified. He approached slowly, dragging his shoes across the wet gravel, and sank down onto the seat. She rested her elbows on her knees and buried her hands in her soaking hair, her gaze fixed on the puddles forming on the floor.
Her mind, finally freed from the block of trauma, began to replay the story of High School DxD with overwhelming clarity. She remembered the protagonists: Rias Gremory, the demon princess pretending to be a student; Issei Hyoudou, the hero destined to have it all; Azazel, Sirzechs, Michael... She remembered the great battles, the speeches about friendship, love, and dreams.
But the more she recalled the "canon," the more her stomach churned with unbearable nausea.
On the television screen in her old room, it had been an entertaining action comedy. But here, breathing the same air as those beings, reality was a Lovecraftian nightmare. He realized the brutal and unjust truth: while the protagonists, with their magical lineages and Sacred Gears, lived thrilling adventures, forged eternal bonds, and had happy endings, ordinary humans were nothing more than collateral damage. They were ants trampled by titans.
People died in the crossfire, their memories rewritten. The owner of the Saturn shop, the kind old man who had given him shelter and food, had probably been killed for knowing something he shouldn't have, silenced by this rotten world. Akeno had had to flee in the rain, terrified. And he… he had been ripped from his safe universe, condemned to starve, humiliated, and stripped of his future, simply on the whim of some dimensional god.
The rain intensified, masking the tears that finally began to well up in his empty eyes.
"What am I supposed to do?" he thought, feeling his throat close up. "I have nothing."
In other stories, the reincarnated protagonist awoke with a dragon in his soul, or with the magic of a high-ranking demon. But he wasn't special. He was just a twenty-one-year-old who knew how to manage store inventories and clean floors. He couldn't fight. And if he tried to play the "prophet," if he approached any faction—be it the Gremorys, the Sitri, the Fallen, or the Church—offering them information about the future in exchange for help getting home… reality slapped him in the face again. They wouldn't help him. The demons would forcibly read his mind, the fallen angels would torture him for fun to extract every last secret, and the Church would execute him for heresy.
He was cornered. Trapped on a chessboard where he wasn't even a pawn; he was just a speck of dust on the squares.
It was then, in the deepest pit of his despair, that a whisper was born in the most hidden recesses of his psyche. A cold, logical voice born of pure resentment.
"Kill them all. Destroy their story before it even begins."
The young man gasped, his eyes wide, his trembling hands clutching his head. "No… no, no, no…" he murmured, shaking his face to banish the thought.
He wasn't like this. He was a hardworking young man who endured his sister's teasing with a smile. He was the older brother who let his little brother win at video games. He was the son who sent every last penny to help his mother. He was the same man who had taken in a terrified little girl, giving her his own bed and feeding her strawberry candy. He was a good man. He was kind. He wasn't a murderer.
But as he shook his head, weeping in the rain, something imperceptible was happening. Hidden beneath his soaked shirt, the strange black crystal pendant—the farewell gift from the Saturn's former owner—began to glow. It wasn't a bright light, but a dull glow, as if it were absorbing the light around it, pulsing to the rhythm of the young man's racing heart.
The artifact wasn't a mind-control device. It didn't have an evil spirit whispering in his ear, nor was it forcing him to do anything against his will. Its sole function, its curse, was that of an amplifying mirror.
Suddenly, the young man felt all his emotions erupt within him with volcanic intensity. His love for his family and his longing for home became so strong that he felt his chest would burst open. His memories of Akeno's shy smile filled him with immense tenderness. But the artifact's scales didn't discriminate. Just as it amplified his kindness, it poured gasoline on his pain.
The injustice of being torn from his bed. The agonizing hunger he had suffered on the streets. The humiliation of begging. Knowing that his letters were rotting in a warehouse. The fear in Akeno's eyes as she fled into the storm, driven by the supernatural world.
The pain was unbearable. It was a white fire consuming him from the inside. He clutched his chest, hunching over the bench as he screamed., her throat raw, a sound drowned out by a thunderclap that echoed across the Kuoh skies. Her mind was fracturing under the pressure of two titanic forces: the morality of the kind-hearted human she once was, and the cosmic hatred of a victim robbed of all meaning in her existence.
And in the midst of that mental agony, clarity descended upon her like a guillotine blade.
She realized something fundamental. A perfect, lethal justification. "This world is fiction."
If he had seen Rias Gremory, Issei Hyoudou, and the Fallen Angels on a television screen in his real world... that meant none of it held any genuine value. If this world was a mere illusion, a narrative construct, then the people who inhabited it weren't real "people." They were drawings. They were concepts.
His mother, his sister, his brother... they were real. Their warmth, their love, their blood. And this cheap universe, this disgusting theater of magic and arrogant demons, had had the audacity to drag him into it, away from the only truth that mattered. They had stolen his reality to trap him in a cheap fantasy.
"If none of this is real... then it doesn't matter if I break it."
The internal debate stopped abruptly. The pain vanished, swallowed by the absolute void.
It wasn't the dark crystal that made the decision. It wasn't a possession. It was him. Of his own free will, the young foreigner stretched his arms within his own soul and embraced the darkness. He decided he no longer wanted to suffer. He decided he no longer wanted to be the kind victim.
He slowly raised his face. The rain trickled down his cheeks, but the tears had dried forever. The warm, compassionate, and human gaze that had always defined him vanished like a candle blown out by a hurricane. In its place, something terrifying was born. His eyes became two abysses of darkness, pools of black water where the streetlights couldn't reflect. A dead, methodical, calculating gaze, devoid of the slightest empathy or pity.
If the universe had snatched his family away to keep this stupid fairy tale alive, he would make sure the tale didn't have a happy ending. He didn't need powers right now. He had years ahead of him. Ten years, exactly, before the "Canon" began. Ten years to study his enemies, learn their rules, infiltrate their schools, and prepare the ground.
When the "heroes" of this story felt secure on top of the world, he would be there, lurking in the shadows, ready to rip away everything they loved.
....
The rain continued to fall with the fury of divine punishment as the young man crossed the threshold once more of what had been the Saturn Mini-Mart. His shoes crunched on the bed of broken glass, shattered plastic, and puddles where stormwater mingled with spilled juices and the dried blood from his own hands.
There was no longer any despair in his stride. No crying, no prayers, no denial. His face was a mask of ice, pale and empty, intermittently illuminated by the lightning that ripped across the Kuoh sky.
He walked slowly toward the back room, ignoring the open safe and the money scattered on the floor. That paper had no value; it was currency in a fantasy world he was about to dismantle. He rummaged through the debris of the fallen shelves until he found what he was looking for: a hardbound ledger, miraculously dry, and a black pen.
He sat on the cold floor, crossed his legs, and opened the notebook to the first blank page.
Under the dim, flickering emergency light that still lingered in the building, he began to write. He didn't write in the Japanese he had struggled so hard to learn, but in his native language, Spanish, making sure that if anyone ever found this journal, they would only see the incomprehensible scribbles of a madman.
He wrote with frantic speed, pressing the pen so hard he almost tore the paper. He was emptying his mind, transferring every memory from the High School DxD "canon" that his brain had been suppressing.
He noted names, clans, alliances, and weaknesses. Rias Gremory. Issei Hyoudou. Akeno Himejima. Asia Argento. Koneko Toujou. Yuto Kiba. He sketched clumsy diagrams of the Sacred Gears, detailed the structure of the Three Factions (Angels, Demons, and Fallen Angels), and outlined future events: Raynare's death, the Rating Game against Riser Phenex, Kokabiel's attack, the leaders' summit.
When he reached the protagonist, Issei Hyoudou, the pen stopped. A black ink stain began to spread across the paper as his calculating mind weighed the options.
His most basic instinct told him that, to destroy the story, he had to kill the protagonist before it all began. Kill the brown-haired boy he had just seen playing in the park. However, his cold logic, amplified by the dark crystal throbbing in his chest, dismissed the idea almost immediately.
"I can't kill the protagonist," he wrote, underlining the sentence three times. "The world protects him."
He understood the narrative of this sick universe. Issei was a singularity, the wielder of the Red Dragon Emperor. If he tried to kill him, the universe itself, the "armor of the plot," would twist to save him. Ddraig might awaken prematurely from the danger and incinerate him; a street demon might appear out of nowhere to interrupt the attack; or worse, the boy's own latent talent might save him by sheer luck. Going against the protagonist was going against the very will of this world's reality.
His gaze shifted to another name on the list. A name written in sharp letters.
Rias Gremory.
She was the true key. The cornerstone upon which the entire house of cards was built. Rias was the one who reincarnated Issei, who took Akeno in, who saved Asia, who pulled the strings in Kuoh City with the arrogance of an untouchable princess. She didn't have the cosmic protection of a typical shonen protagonist; she was strong, yes, but she relied on her lineage, her nobility, and her status. Rias believed the human world was her personal, secure chessboard.
"If I kill her... the story dies before it's born. Without Rias, Issei will simply be killed by the Fallen Angels and vanish. Without Rias, the Gremory clan descends into chaos. It's the perfect cut."
She tore out the page with Issei's name, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it into the puddle of dirty water. She closed the notebook, tucked it under her soaked jacket, and stepped out of the Saturn for the last time. Kuoh was no longer her home, nor her refuge. It was her future hunting ground.
But to hunt a pureblood demon, willpower and hatred weren't enough. A baseball bat or a kitchen knife would shatter against the Demon King's sister's aura. She needed a weapon. She needed the specific poison for demons: light.
He left the city that very night, traveling as a stowaway on freight trains, losing himself in Japan's vast rail network. His destination was a coastal city in the south, a place with a strong historical Christian presence where rumors (drawn from his deep knowledge of the lore) indicated that the Church maintained small bases of operations for its novice or exiled exorcists.
He survived for weeks in alleyways, feeding on scraps, watching the chapels from the shadows, the black crystal around his neck suppressing any trace of his presence. Until he found him.
He was a young exorcist, perhaps only a couple of years older than he had been in his past life. He walked with his back straight, carrying a heavy metal briefcase, and his eyes shone with the stupid, blind devotion of the righteous. He was perfect. Naive.
The young man approached him not as an attacker, but as a victim. He staged an encounter in a dark alley, pretending to be fleeing from thugs, falling at the exorcist's feet, weeping, trembling. He appealed to the man's Christian charity.
The exorcist, whose name turned out to be Matthew, took him in at a small room in a cheap boarding house. For days, the young man played the part of the broken and frightened human. They shared simple meals. He listened patiently, head bowed and a mock expression of awe on his face, as Mateo spoke of God's love, the divine light that protects the innocent, and the duty to eradicate the demons lurking in the darkness.
Inside, the young man was drowning in an ocean of bile and revulsion.
"Tell me about your God," the young man thought, clenching his fists under the table as he pretended to pray beside the exorcist. "Tell me about that corpse rotting in the Seventh Heaven since the Great War. You worship a ghost in a world of lies."
The knowledge that God was dead in the DxD universe made Mateo's devotion seem pathetic and nauseating. It was the final confirmation that everything in this world was a macabre mockery.
Despite his hatred, pulling the trigger was the hardest test of his life. The young man was not a natural killer. His mind was already fractured, but the gulf between wishing for death and taking a life with his own hands was immense.
There were three failed attempts. Once, he held a knife to Mateo's neck as he slept, but his hands trembled so violently that he dropped the weapon, having to feign a panic attack over "nightmares." Another afternoon, he considered poisoning his tea, but the fear that the exorcist possessed magical resistance stopped him. Each failure filled him with frustration and self-loathing.
Finally, the opportunity presented itself one moonless night near the port. Mateo had tracked down a low-level street demon and asked the young man to stay behind, safe. The exorcist dispatched the creature swiftly with a dazzling blade of light he drew from his briefcase. As the beast turned to dust, Mateo knelt, exhausted, to pray for the corrupted soul, his back to his "friend."
The young man knew there wouldn't be another chance.
He picked up a thick, rusty steel pipe lying among the port's debris. The sound of the waves drowned out his footsteps. He raised the pipe with both hands. His heart pounded so hard he thought his chest would burst. The black glass pulsed violently, feeding on his fear and transforming it into an icy determination.
He brought the weapon down with all his might.
The impact against Mateo's skull produced a dull, wet sound. The exorcist didn't scream; he simply slumped forward, convulsing slightly on the damp concrete. The young man didn't stop. He struck again. And again. And again. His hands became covered in blood, his breath a wild gasp, and with each blow, the last thread that bound him to the morality of his past life was severed completely.
When the body stopped moving, the young man dropped the bloodied pipe. He fell to his knees, vomiting violently onto the floor, wracked by spasms of horror and disgust. He wept, cursing the universe, cursing himself, realizing he had just murdered in cold blood a man who had only tried to help him. His mind shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces.
With trembling, slippery hands, he rummaged through the corpse's clothing until he found the cylindrical hilt. As he grasped it, his chaotic, intense emotions seemed to flow, and a blade of pure, whirring, lethal light erupted from the handle, illuminating his deranged, tear-streaked face.
He stole the briefcase, some money, and fled into the darkness, leaving behind the dead man and his own humanity.
What followed were years of a discipline born of pure madness.
The young man isolated himself in the ruins of an abandoned factory on the outskirts of a distant province. He knew that having a light weapon wasn't enough. Rias Gremory was fast, strong, and would be surrounded by her peerage. If he wielded the sword like a novice, Akeno would fry him with lightning before he could take a step, or Kiba would decapitate him.
He needed a single movement. A perfect, precise, inescapable, and absolute cut.
He began training his physical body, ignoring any human limitations. Without a master, he applied the extreme logic of his obsession: repetition until destruction. He practiced the rapid draw—Battojutsu—thousands, tens of thousands of times a day.
He destroyed his muscles. His ligaments tore and healed unevenly. His shoulder and elbow joints clicked with agonizing pain every morning, forcing him to consume stolen painkillers and bandage his arms so tightly that he cut off his circulation. He didn't care that this brutal training shortened his lifespan, he didn't care if he was paralyzed at thirty. He only needed his body to hold out long enough for that day, ten years from now.
He reached a brutal conclusion: even if, for some magical reason, the sacred light failed him or Rias's aura resisted it, the sheer kinetic force of a perfect cut, delivered with the full weight of his hatred and executed at imperceptible speed from a blind spot, would split the demon's neck in two. A single cut. That was all that mattered.
While his body transformed into a single-use weapon, his mind devoted itself to crafting the perfect disguise.
To assassinate Rias Gremory, he needed to be in the same room as her without her defenses being up. He needed to infiltrate Kuoh Academy.
He cut his hair, began wearing glasses with understated frames to soften his lifeless gaze, and practiced in front of broken mirrors until he recovered a warm, paternal smile—the smile of a harmless teacher. He spent his downtime from his grueling physical training devouring books on history, literature, and pedagogy. He perfected his Japanese until not a trace of his foreign accent remained. He used the stolen money to buy false identities on the black market, forging an impeccable résumé, the record of a dull, ordinary educator, someone whom even the meticulous Sona Sitri wouldn't consider a threat when reviewing job applications.
It was a slow, painful, lonely process, consumed by darkness. The construction of a perfect phantom designed for the sole purpose of destroying the game board of the gods.
The entire preparation process, from Mateo's death to obtaining his forged teaching license and being ready to return to the city he had sworn to burn, took him exactly six years.
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I'm back, sorry for disappearing. The thing is, that darn AI was giving me backstories and scenarios that even made me question my own existence. Anyway, that's it for this chapter. I already have five more chapters ready to analyze and upload; if all goes well, I'll upload one every day. With that said, see you in the next chapter. Take care.
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( ̳• · • ̳) ~ ♡ Thanks for reading ♡
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