Kai turned the question over briefly, then decided to treat it as literal.
She was surprised that he could see her.
He took a moment to actually look at her. She was wearing an ordinary high school uniform, but everything else about her read as distinctly out of the ordinary. Long limbs, precise proportions, the kind of natural poise that didn't come from effort—it was simply the way she was built. Her face was small-featured and serious, carrying a gravity that read older than it probably was. Her eyes were deep and composed, and there was a quality to her stillness that was different from shyness or reserve. It was more like someone who had learned to take up exactly as much space as she chose, and no more.
"What do you mean, 'can see you?'" Kai asked.
"Exactly what it sounds like," she replied.
Her tone was even, unhurried, as though she were commenting on the weather.
"I can see you clearly," Kai said. Then, under his breath: Is she a ghost? Can I only see her because of this Devil body?Rias hadn't said anything about that being a possibility, but she also hadn't given him an exhaustive briefing on the supernatural population of this city.
"Other people can't see you?" he asked, keeping his voice neutral. He had been attacked twice in the past week by things he hadn't expected. Caution was a reasonable default.
"Though I'm not particularly happy admitting it—no," she said. "They can't. It's not catastrophic, but it's…" A small pause. "Distressing."
The word was delivered with a kind of disciplined flatness, as though she'd decided some time ago that distress was a thing to be acknowledged and then set aside rather than dwelt upon.
Kai settled slightly. There was no hostility coming off her—nothing that triggered the quiet, instinctive awareness he'd noticed his Devil body carrying since the conversion. She was simply a person with a problem, and she was telling him about it with the straightforward economy of someone who didn't perform.
"In that case," he said, "you might want to take a look at this." He held out the flyer. "Wish fulfillment. Divination. It's possible we could help."
He also registered, distantly, that she looked familiar. He couldn't place it immediately.
The girl seemed fractionally comforted—not visibly moved, but something in her expression eased, the way a drawn breath releases when it no longer needs to be held. She reached out and took the flyer.
She looked at it. "A magic circle?" Her voice carried the precise inflection of someone forming a specific conclusion. "Is this some kind of occult promotional material?"
Called it, Kai thought. He kept his smile in place. "Not quite. Our club runs an occult-themed wish-fulfillment service. Think of it as being in exceptionally good hands for unusual problems."
"Occult Research Club," she read aloud from the flyer, the words settling into something that looked, briefly, like consideration. An invisible girl standing on a public street, being handed a flyer by the one person who could see her, for a club that handled the inexplicable.
The irony was not subtle.
She tucked the flyer into her pocket. "If I have time, I'll come by." She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a small nod. "Goodbye."
"Thank you," Kai said.
She turned and walked away through the crowd, disappearing into it the way only someone who was used to not being noticed could. After a few steps, she paused without turning back—more to herself than to him.
"Something felt off about that smile. Too polished. Like watching someone who practices in front of a mirror." A brief pause. "I wonder if he's in the industry."
Then she was gone.
Kai processed this in silence.
His Devil body had given him a number of things he was still cataloguing. One of them was hearing precise enough to pick up a murmured aside from a receding figure at a distance. He had heard every word she said.
He had believed his customer service expression was reasonably convincing. He had been wrong—or at least, he'd been wrong in front of someone who knew exactly what a manufactured smile looked like and had the professional basis to identify one on contact.
Wait.
He looked up.
Across the street, mounted on the face of a building, an oversized LED screen cycled through advertisements. One of them was playing now. The girl in the image was smiling—warmly, naturally, the way the girl he'd just spoken to had not smiled even once.
He read the name in the corner of the frame.
Mai Sakurajima.
Kai blinked.
Not a ghost. Not someone with a marginal local following. A genuine celebrity—a working actress whose face was apparently large enough to occupy the side of a building.
No wonder she'd seen through him in under thirty seconds. He'd walked up to someone who made her living reading and producing performance, and offered her his practiced retail expression like it was something.
That's embarrassing.
He filed it away and moved on.
A celebrity who was invisible to ordinary people. This world was not short on surprises. Given that it already contained Angels, Devils, Fallen Angels, and apparently any number of other categories he hadn't been fully briefed on yet, a human with some form of inexplicable ability didn't seem particularly out of place. It was more a question of what kind of ability, and what had caused it.
Rias might know. Something to ask later.
He distributed the last of his flyers and started home.
Walking alone in the cooling evening air, Kai found his thoughts drifting to the teleportation Rias and the others used—the easy, frictionless movement between locations that he currently had no access to. Akeno had explained it plainly: a skill available to higher-ranked Devils. Kai, at present, was as low on that hierarchy as it was possible to be.
Getting anywhere on foot took time. Time he could have spent doing something useful.
The gap between where I am and where I need to be is significant.
Closing it meant contracts. Contracts meant power. Power meant rank. Rank meant access to things like not having to walk home in the dark.
He had just distributed several dozen summoning flyers. Whether any of them would actually be used was an open question. He wondered about it idly—who picks up a flyer on the street and actually follows through?
His body tensed before the thought finished forming.
Something in the quality of the air changed—a subtle pressure, like the moment before lightning finds its target. His Devil instincts fired cleanly and without ambiguity.
Threat. Close.
Kai slowed his pace and let his gaze move carefully across his surroundings.
The street had emptied without him noticing. The sky had gone from dark blue to black. And from somewhere above, black feathers were drifting down.
A figure descended from the dark and landed on the road ahead of him—a woman with black wings folded at her back, her outfit a collection of minimal black straps that covered the necessary and left everything else to the night air. Her looks were objectively striking, though the heavy, dark eye makeup gave her features an unsettling, theatrical edge—as though she'd applied it in the dark, or simply didn't care that it read as sinister.
Another Fallen Angel.
Kai exhaled through his nose.
Again.
The Fallen Angel looked him over with unconcealed contempt. "A Low-class Devil. Really." She said it the way someone says is that all? "Killing something this weak would be tedious. I'd rather not waste a Light Spear on you."
The peace treaty between the three factions was, apparently, more of a guideline than a rule when the streets were empty and no one was watching.
Kai looked at her—the wings, the straps, the dramatic eye makeup, the casual homicidal dismissal—and something in him stopped performing entirely.
"Coming across someone dressed like that in the middle of the night," he said, "my first instinct is to turn around and walk the other direction."
The Fallen Angel stared at him.
"…What did you just say?"