POV: Haruki
"You're way too fucking good with a sword, you know that?" I said. "And that Sacred Gear of yours is complete bullshit. What did you do to earn that thing, successfully exit the womb? Fucking theocratic Cronyism."
Kiba Yuuto, my smiling tormentor and sparring partner for the last week, raised an eyebrow while casually tossing his practice sword from one hand to the other. He looked like someone who'd just finished a morning jog, not like someone who could hurl me across a training field without even trying. He was deceptively strong for his build and a consummate virtuoso with a sword.
"What was that?" Kiba chuckled, spinning his practice sword lazily. "Couldn't hear you over all the pathetic whining. And besides, this is rich coming from Mr. I mastered demonic energy manipulation in three days. You have no room to complain."
I groaned from the ground, too exhausted to move and too proud to admit that I might actually be enjoying myself, so I settled for sticking my tongue out at him like a mature adult. Akeno had finished drilling the fundamentals of demonic energy control into me, after describing my affinity for it as something akin to a fish discovering water, and now came the considerably less pleasant business of applying those fundamentals in combat. There was an enormous difference between maintaining [Crimson Surge] during training - where I could devote my entire concentration to controlling the energy - and doing the same while another person was actively attempting to cave my ribs in.
An opponent wouldn't hardly grant me a courteous interval to gather my thoughts, circulate my energy, select the appropriate technique, and prepare myself before attacking. That meant learning under pressure, which meant sparring with Kiba every day. He had kindly volunteered for the responsibility. Lucky me…not.
I spent the better part of a week getting the ever-loving hell beaten out of me by Anime Legolas with a gym membership, who apparently interpreted beginner as a request for only the slenderest possible measure of mercy. Hand-to-hand combat, swordplay, mixed engagements, whatever variation allowed him to demonstrate another deficiency in my fighting ability, he used it. We must have fought over a hundred times by now, and I had yet to land a single clean hit. That was a genuinely unfamiliar experience for me. I had encountered people better than me before, obviously, but being so comprehensively outclassed that success meant surviving another few seconds was something new. Still, the gap was narrowing. Every bout lasted a little longer, every exchange taught me something, and recently I had begun forcing Kiba to pay actual attention.
During our first matches, I could barely perceive him moving. The smug bastard insisted he was slowing himself down for my benefit, his definition of slow apparently included disappearing from my field of vision, appearing behind me, and knocking the breath from my lungs before my nervous system had finished registering his absence. I quickly discovered that [Wrathlash] could enhance my eyesight enough to follow his inhuman speed, which merely introduced another problem. Seeing an attack and responding to it were separate skills. I could concentrate demonic energy into my eyes and perceive Kiba's movements, or direct that energy into my limbs quickly enough to defend myself, but doing both while reading his posture, predicting his next strike, controlling my own balance, and deciding how to counter him overwhelmed me.
Trying to manipulate demonic energy during combat felt like reading two books simultaneously while someone threw dodgeballs at my face. I had to gather the energy, direct it toward the appropriate part of my body, determine the necessary output, and time everything to the fraction of a second when it became useful. Kiba assured me that experience eventually pushed much of the process beneath conscious thought. Walking worked much the same way, Kiba said. A child initially stumbled while consciously coordinating muscles and balance, until repetition taught the brain to perform the entire operation without conscious effort.
Kiba could reinforce himself as casually as another person might flex a hand, and according to him it had taken roughly three months before he could comfortably fight while manipulating demonic energy at the same time.
I intended to manage it within one month. I expected nothing less from myself.
Hence why we had spent the entire week in full Rocky-montage mode. I did not even bother to go to school, sitting through calculus and classical Japanese suddenly felt so superannuated when I had just discovered that reality contained an entire magical civilization waiting to be explored. I decided that I would return once I landed one goddamn hit on Kiba, and afterward there would be aerial combat, barrier theory, enchantment, summoning, teleportation, alchemy, ritual magic and whatever principles governed the interaction between different supernatural energies. There were Rating Games to study, especially recordings of elite competitors whose battles could teach me how experienced devils fight.
Then there was the history of the Three Factions, the development of devil magic, the biology of supernatural species, the Sacred Gears system, and perhaps most fascinating of all, the opportunity to explore which myths from my old world were most accurate. How much had Hesiod gotten right? What about the Mahabharata, the Kojiki, the Edda, the grimoires of medieval Europe? Every answer seemed to breed another dozen questions, and I wanted all of them. There was so much to learn that the prospect of spending centuries doing it suddenly seemed insufficient. I always had an obsessive streak, the refusal to release a subject until I had taken it apart and understood every moving piece, and magic had given that hunger something effectively inexhaustible to consume. I felt like an addict discovering the drug he had unknowingly spent his entire life craving, and God help me, I loved every second of it.
Magic was simply too goddamn fun to leave alone~
I exhaled heavily and stared up at the sky. "My progress isn't nearly enough! I need to do better!" I promised myself.
"Haruki," Kiba said, lowering his sword and sitting next to me, "you've been training for a week. A single week. It's normal that you haven't landed a hit. I've been training for years, after all."
"I know," I muttered. "It's just the first time I'm… struggling. Like, actually struggling."
"Your arrogance is always amusing," he said, amused, obviously. "What you've done in a week takes most devils months of focused training. And yet, here you are, calling it struggling because you didn't instantly master it."
"Well, sorry I'm built different," I said, grinning smugly.
"Apparently not that different, since you still can't land a single hit," he replied, nudging me with his elbow. "You've fought me over a hundred times. You've improved. Massively."
"Just not enough," I muttered.
"You're so used to things coming easy, you confuse effort with failure," he said with a smile that wasn't unkind. "What you call struggle is other people's miracle."
"That's irrelevant," I said with a sigh. "I'm not other people. The only useful point of comparison is who I was yesterday, and if I haven't learned something today that I didn't know yesterday, then I've failed."
Kiba laughed. "You really are something else. I suppose that attitude explains your academic record, but you shouldn't push yourself too hard." His expression turned faintly wistful as he rested the practice sword against his shoulder. "Devils live for ten thousand years at the very least. That is a very long time, Haruki. It might do you some good to leave a few things for later. What else are you going to do with the rest of eternity? Near-immortality can become a curse when you have nothing left to occupy yourself with."
"Don't be ridiculous, Kiba," I said lazily. "The world is an infinite palimpsest. There is always another layer beneath the one you think you understand. Music, painting, literature, history, mathematics, philosophy, the natural sciences - entire disciplines that no one could master in ten ordinary lifetimes, and now I have magic on top of all that. There are stars and planets I might actually live long enough to visit, especially now that I can fly. Ten thousand years will pass in the blink of an eye. Anyone who gets bored after a mere ten millennia simply lacks a genuine peripatetic impulse."
"Well, I hope that stays true for you," Kiba said softly. "In any case, I noticed a major problem with your fighting style that you'll need to keep in mind."
"What's that?" I asked, immediately giving him my full attention.
"Do you know how fast a tiger can run at maximum speed?" Kiba asked suddenly.
"Significantly faster than a human," I replied. "Somewhere around sixty-five Km/h, I believe. We've had similar problems in mathematics class."
"And they say school doesn't prepare you for the real world," Kiba joked. "A tiger can cover a hundred meters in about five seconds. The interesting part is that it can only maintain that top speed for around ten seconds at best. Do you know why?"
"Because a tiger's limbs contain a high proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers designed for explosive power," I explained. "That kind of exertion consumes energy at an unsustainable rate and produces metabolic byproducts faster than the body can clear them. A sprint also generates tremendous heat, while its cardiovascular and respiratory systems can only deliver oxygen and dissipate that heat so quickly."
"You're such a nerd," Kiba said playfully. "But you're right. A tiger can't sustain its maximum speed because the energy expenditure is enormous. Devils work on a similar principle. Most of our superhuman feats require demonic energy, which means every enhancement has a cost. During a real fight, you have to manage your reserves carefully or you'll exhaust yourself before your opponent does, and from what I've seen during our spars, you really love doing exactly that."
"Really?" I asked, surprised.
"Did you seriously not notice how quickly you've been tiring?" Kiba asked. "Your demonic energy reserves are enormous for a newly reincarnated devil, especially one without a magical bloodline or Sacred Gear. You're already around Middle-Class, roughly the same level as me. With reserves like yours, you should comfortably fight for over ten minutes at a time, but you can't because you're terribly inefficient."
For some reason, I had an unusually large quantity of demonic energy. Most newly reincarnated devils apparently began somewhere around Low-Class, while unfortunate cases like Issei started even lower. Mine was strange because I had no Sacred Gear, magical ancestry, or other obvious gift to account for it, but apparently such anomalies occurred often enough that nobody considered mine unprecedented. Rias had mentioned her brother's Bishop, the legendary magician MacGregor Mathers, who supposedly had High-Class reserves immediately after reincarnation. The prevailing theory said that mental fortitude, the strength of the soul and spirit, and even the physical condition of the body could significantly influence how much demonic energy a person developed upon becoming a reincarnation.
"I just thought my endurance was shit," I said flatly.
"Nope, you're the one making your endurance shit," Kiba dismantled my defense with a cheerful smile. "You're so obsessed with landing a hit on me that you're wasting energy unnecessarily. You keep using demonic power to push yourself to maximum speed because you think that's the only way you'll catch me, but a tiger can't sprint at full speed forever, and neither can you. Your reserves are finite. The faster you want to move and the harder you want to hit, the more energy you have to spend."
"How dare you imply that my 'random bullshit, go' strategy is stupid?!" I demanded, appropriately outraged.
"Your words, not mine," Kiba replied playfully. "And it might work against an inexperienced opponent, or someone much slower than you, but anyone with average intelligence will simply let you exhaust yourself. You need to pick your moments carefully, Haruki. A tiger is an excellent hunter because it understands its strengths and limitations. If it commits too early, its prey escapes, so it waits, stalks, closes the distance, and only explodes into full speed once an opening appears. You need to learn the same thing. Defend, conserve your energy, wait for an opening, and commit to the counterattack when it actually matters."
"How fast can you go?" I asked curiously.
"I'm a Knight, so my speed is much higher than even a normal peak Middle-Class devil's," he said with shameless pride. "At top speed, I can cover roughly seventy meters in a second. So you'll have to be especially careful about overcommitting against me because I'm both faster and considerably more experienced than you. Stay on the defensive, make me come close, and wait until I'm within range before you commit to the attack."
"Are you sure you want to tell me how to defeat you?" I asked with a challenging smile.
"Don't flatter yourself," Kiba said with a grin. "I could tell you exactly how and when I'm going to attack, and there still wouldn't be a thing you could do to stop me. You can barely multitask during combat right now, much less keep up with me."
"I swear on everyone's soul but mine that I will make you eat those words before the end of this month," I vowed dramatically.
"Well, you just doomed everyone's souls," Kiba said, laughing.
We stayed there for a while, letting our pulses settle and our egos recover in peace. The conversation wandered through whatever came to mind, mostly Kiba nerding out about different schools of swordsmanship while I listened with genuine interest as he launched into a long explanation of his favorite style. It was actually rather adorable. I liked people who were sincerely passionate about something, especially when they knew enough to forget themselves while talking about it.
Eventually we started debating who would win between Rias and Akeno, and Kiba was surprisingly adamant that Rias would demolish her. I couldn't remember Rias doing much fighting during the first two seasons of the anime, although that probably had something to do with me skipping most of the actual plot. I did remember Akeno throwing lightning around, and younger me had naturally followed the first law of anime reasoning: lightning looked incredibly cool, therefore the person using it must be incredibly powerful. Apparently Rias was no slouch herself, at least according to Kiba. Eventually, as conversations sometimes do when two exhausted people have been lying around talking for long enough, ours wandered into more spiritual territory.
"Can I ask you something?" I said finally.
"Of course."
"You ever think about… you know. All of this. The whole 'devil who used to be human' situation. The metaphysics. Free will. Cosmic alignment. That kind of crap."
He raised an eyebrow. "You're getting philosophical now?"
"I'm sore, sleep-deprived, and emotionally compromised. It's prime existential crisis time."
"Fair enough." He laughed softly.
I looked at him, at the gentle smile, the calm eyes, and that quiet air of someone who had already seen enough ugliness to find very little surprising anymore. Considering we were living in an anime world, assuming some terrible childhood trauma lurked somewhere in his past hardly required prophetic insight. Unfortunately, all I remembered of Kiba from the anime was that he once fought an attractive blue-haired exorcist, and I had only watched that scene because her exorcist outfit was ridiculously hot.
"You were human once," I said. "You believed in god if I'm not mistaken. Like, capital-B believed. In God, in purpose, in good and evil. Does any of that still stick?"
There was a long pause.
Kiba looked at the ceiling, contemplating. "you're still wondering why it happened. Why He let it happen? Why He didn't stop it, aren't you?"
"…Something like that."
"You still believe He's watching you, don't you?" he asked, his voice strangely serene. "Even now. Even like this. A devil with the cross carved into his memory, still wondering if God might look down and change His mind."
I didn't answer.
"Let me guess, you're angry that He let this happen. That He didn't stop it. That He watched while you fell, and said nothing. That silence… it's loud, isn't it?" Kiba's voice was calm, but there was something serrated beneath it. "But here's what I've learned, something you probably already suspect. That silence? It's not new. It's always been there. We just didn't want to admit it. People say God is love. They quote saints who kissed lepers and slept in the snow with beggars. And maybe that happened. Maybe some man once held a dying stranger and called it holiness. But I don't believe it was love. Not real love. It was guilt dressed in robes. Obedience based on Fear. The kind of 'charity' that hurts more than it heals, because it tells the suffering: this is your cross, carry it.
"That's the core of the system, isn't it? Obey. Endure. Hurt. And call it sacred. I'm told suffering has meaning. That it purifies. That it tests the soul. But it always seems to test the ones with no choice, doesn't it? The orphan. The beggar. The child. Not the bishops, not the kings…not men with powers. No, they get incense and hymns. The poor get silence and pain and a parable about the virtues of being poor. And when someone does ask why - why children starve, why innocents bleed - the answer is always some version of: we can't understand His plan. Convenient.
"Maybe there is a plan. Maybe it ends in light and choirs and eternal peace. Maybe it all balances out, and the scales of heaven are precise down to the final tear. But I don't care. Because if the price of that harmony is one child locked in a cellar, crying to a God who never answers, then it's not worth it. No paradise justifies that. No future revelation redeems that silence. You want to know the truth? I don't hate God. I reject him. You can keep wrestling with Him if you want. Keep shouting at the sky. But eventually, you'll have to decide if you're still waiting for an answer or if you're finally ready to live without one."
"And what about now?" I asked softly. "Didn't you simply trade holy chains for demonic ones?"
"Rias never lied to me or demanded that I endure suffering for some distant promise of eternal salvation," Kiba said, his voice suddenly cold. "She never asked me to have faith that all my suffering served some grand purpose I was simply too ignorant to understand."
Silence settled over the training field, and for once, even my smart mouth could find nothing worth saying.