With three pairs of eyes watching him, Kai went still, closed his eyes, and turned his attention inward.
He set aside the room, the sofa, the quiet presence of the three girls, and reached for whatever it was that had answered him in the park—that flash of silver-white that had appeared from nothing and stopped a spear of light dead.
He found something. Not a sound, not a sensation he had words for—more like a pull. A distant point of origin, faint but unmistakable, the way a compass needle always knows which way to turn.
He followed it.
His awareness slipped sideways—still present in his body, still able to feel the chair beneath him and the air in the room—but his perception had opened into somewhere else entirely. An interior landscape, vast and lightless, stretching in every direction without boundary or end.
Somewhere in that darkness, the pull resolved into a point of white light.
He moved toward it. The light grew.
And as it grew, what lay behind it came into focus.
A city.
Not just a city—something that had no right to fit inside a person's chest. Walls of dark iron, hundreds of meters high, running left and right until they vanished into darkness with no end in sight. The stone was carved from top to bottom with elaborate work—birds, beasts, figures locked in battle, inscriptions in scripts he didn't recognize but somehow understood were old. Deeply, irrevocably old.
On the battlements, soldiers in black armor stood at attention. Motionless. Silent. Countless.
Kai looked at the city for a long moment and felt the scale of it settle over him like weather.
It was magnificent. And it was utterly still—the stillness of something that had been waiting for an incomprehensible length of time.
Then his gaze found the gate.
Above the central arch stood a statue. A man on horseback—his mount rearing, hooves cutting the air, mane streaming as though caught in a wind that no longer blew. The rider sat the horse with perfect ease, one arm raised, one lowered. But where his face should have been, there was nothing. Smooth stone. A figure without features, without identity, defined entirely by what he held.
In his left hand: a silver longsword.
In his right: a silver shield.
The same set that had appeared in the park.
In a city of black iron and deep shadow, those two objects shone with the only light that existed there. The white radiance Kai had followed across the void had been theirs all along.
He moved toward them, and the moment his attention fixed on the gear, the world shifted.
Images came—not as memories, because they weren't his, but as something more immediate than a story. He saw thousands of horses, a sea of riders moving as one. He saw a man with that sword and shield at the front of an army that did not break, could not be turned, that moved through opposition the way a river moves through stone. He saw banners raised over broken ground, and soldiers lifting their voices together, and people—ordinary people—kneeling in a gratitude too large for words.
Then the images changed.
The same man, older. Wearier. Still fighting, still placing himself between his people and whatever threatened them, until the day something came from behind and found the gap in his armor. His blood spread across the shield in a slow, dark tide. The sword fell. The heavens—somewhere, in whatever mythology this had once belonged to—opened up in grief. Dark wind. Rain the color of rust.
And from that ending, the sword and shield had taken on something new. Something that had not been in the steel when it was first forged.
The Sword and Shield of the Benevolent King.
The name came to him quietly, the way understanding sometimes arrives—not as a voice, exactly, but as a certainty that settles into the mind from no discernible direction. A sovereign. A protector. A King who had died in the act of keeping faith with his people.
That was what he was holding.
Kai opened his eyes.
The sword and shield floated in the air before him, silver-white, solid, quiet.
"Ara ara." Akeno's voice was soft with something close to reverence. "The fluctuations from that are remarkable. Whatever's sleeping inside it—there's a great deal being held back."
Kai reached out and closed his hand around the hilt. He drew the blade slowly from the specialized sheath set into the face of the shield, and the ring of steel on metal filled the clubroom with a clean, carrying note.
The shield, apparently of its own opinion about where it should be, drifted into orbit around him with calm, unhurried purpose.
"A sword and shield." Rias smiled, watching him with an expression that sat somewhere between approval and satisfaction. "You really do look the part of a Knight."
Kai didn't respond to that immediately. He was aware of something else—a deeper sense, half-formed, of what the gear might be capable of beyond what he'd already seen. That city hadn't just been a backdrop. It hadn't just been decoration.
He thought it could be called forward.
He reached for it—
"I should mention," Rias said, as though she'd noticed exactly where his attention had gone, "that Sacred Gears don't give up their power easily. Pushing too far beyond your current capacity won't just exhaust you—it can cause real damage. Build up to it."
Kai paused, then let the reach go.
She was right. Whatever the city represented, it wasn't something to grab at blindly. He'd only just confirmed he could summon the sword and shield reliably. The rest could wait until he'd earned it.
He ran through the summoning several more times—calling the gear, releasing it, calling it again—until the process felt as automatic as raising a hand. Then he dismissed it and nodded.
"That should do it."
"Good." Rias stood and stretched. "You're free for the rest of the afternoon. I was occupied all last night on your behalf, and I would very much like a shower."
"I appreciate the effort," Kai said.
He glanced over at Koneko before leaving.
She had been eating since before he arrived and showed no signs of stopping. A small stack of wrappers and empty pastry bags had accumulated neatly at the edge of the table. She ate with complete focus and zero hurry, as though provisions were a matter of ongoing professional responsibility.
It was, somehow, quite endearing.
He gave her a small nod of acknowledgment and headed back to class.
The classroom was waiting for him.
The moment he walked in, he was surrounded.
Everyone wanted to know how he had ended up in Rias Gremory's club. Kai listened to the questions pile up and kept his expression pleasantly neutral.
Because the club is full of Devils who needed a new servant, he did not say.
What he said instead was that Rias had felt he was a good fit for occult studies and extended the invitation personally. This answer landed like a stone in still water. The ripples spread outward in the form of deeply pained male groaning.
"Why you?! I've been trying to get near President Rias since the beginning of term!"
"Akeno-san too—you just walk in and—"
"And Koneko-chan goes to your class?! Do you have any idea how—"
The chorus of anguish continued for some time.
Kai stood in the middle of it, smiled where required, and remained entirely unmoved.
Boys. He thought of the night before with a kind of bleak amusement—Rias Gremory, in his bed, arm around his waist, explaining with serene confidence that she was his Master now. If you only knew what 'close to President Rias' actually looks like, you might revise your ambitions.
He kept that thought firmly to himself.
A little while later, Rias, Akeno, and Koneko filed into the classroom and each greeted him in passing—naturally, without ceremony, as though it were simply the normal way of things.
The temperature among the male population of the class dropped by several degrees.
During the break, Rias appeared beside his desk with a small, entertained smile. "You've become quite famous."
"I could do without this particular variety," Kai said flatly.
"Oh, come on." Akeno settled into the empty seat next to him with the ease of someone who had never been unwelcome anywhere. "Isn't it good to connect with people a little more? You can't spend your whole school life at a distance."
Kai considered this for a moment, then shook his head.
"Fitting in," he said, "assumes there's somewhere to fit. In a world full of ordinary ducks, the swan doesn't belong to the flock—and the flock doesn't particularly want it there either. Forcing it doesn't do anyone any favors."
The three girls looked at him.
A beat of quiet passed.
It was, on its face, a simple observation—blunt, unsentimental, the kind of thing that didn't leave much room for argument. But there was something underneath it that was harder to dismiss: a settled certainty, the conviction of someone who had made his peace with standing apart long before he'd ever had to explain it to anyone.
Kai was, without question, a complicated person to understand.
Whether that made him admirable or simply lonely was a question none of the three chose to ask out loud.