Kuoh Town was quiet at night.
Too quiet.
Kyoya Hibari walked along the shopping district, his dress shoes echoing off the empty street. His right hand carried a tonfa, its metal tip occasionally grazing the asphalt with a sharp, clean ring.
This was his patrol route.
School during the day. The town at night. Kuoh Academy's students didn't just live on campus — they lived in this town, walked these streets, cut through these alleys. If someone laid a hand on a Kuoh Academy student outside school grounds —
That fell under the Disciplinary Committee Chairman's jurisdiction.
No explanation required. No one had ever asked why he still patrolled after dark. The lower-ranking members of the Disciplinary Committee knew the Chairman had this habit. Knowing was enough. They didn't need to understand it. They didn't need to follow.
He didn't need anyone following him.
The April night air still carried a chill. The streetlights stretched Hibari's shadow long and thin behind him. His uniform jacket hung open, the hem lifting in the wind. He passed a bookstore with its shutters down, passed the white hum of a vending machine, passed a stray cat crouched beside a trash can.
The cat saw him. It didn't run.
Hibari glanced at it and kept walking.
The park.
Kuoh Town Central Park. Mothers with children and old men playing chess during the day. Nothing at night. The streetlights left large patches of darkness, and a low mist drifted across the grass.
Hibari caught the smell as he crossed through.
Iron. Rust.
Heavy.
He stopped. The tonfa rotated half a turn without conscious thought — the grip spinning one hundred eighty degrees in his palm, shifting from a hanging carry to a combat grip.
He hadn't decided to do that. His body had switched the moment it registered blood.
The smell was coming from the direction of the fountain.
Hibari didn't speed up. Didn't slow down. He covered the distance at the same pace, his shoes going from sharp clicks on pavement to muffled thuds on grass.
Then he saw it.
Someone was lying on the stone plaza beside the fountain.
A uniform.
Kuoh Academy's uniform.
Hibari recognized it immediately — he looked at that uniform every single day, checking whether it was worn correctly, whether anything was out of code, whether shirts were tucked in. He knew what a Kuoh Academy uniform looked like better than anyone.
The person lying on the ground was Issei Hyoudou.
His classmate. The pervert who shouted about breasts in the hallway during the day. The guy who was always asleep in class, the one Hibari occasionally glimpsed face-down on his desk drooling when he passed the classroom.
Issei Hyoudou now had a hole in his chest.
Not a figure of speech. A literal, physical hole. Something had punched through him — not a blade, more like a direct puncture — entering from the front and exiting through the back. Blood poured steadily from the wound, staining the stone plaza black. Under the streetlights, the blood wasn't red. It was a deep, near-black crimson.
Issei Hyoudou's eyes were open.
He saw Hibari.
His lips moved. Trying to say something. His throat produced a wet, bubbling sound, like air escaping through liquid. But no words. He couldn't speak anymore.
Hibari stood there and looked at him.
There was no fear in Issei Hyoudou's eyes — or rather, the fear had already passed. When a dying person sees someone appear, what surfaces in their eyes is more complicated than that: a flicker of recognition, a struggle to say something, something that almost looked like —
Hibari crouched down.
He didn't touch the wound. Didn't try to apply pressure. Didn't perform any first aid. He simply crouched, moved closer, so Issei wouldn't have to strain to lift his head to see his face.
"Who did this."
Not a question. A statement. His tone flat as a ruled line.
Issei's lips moved again. This time Hibari could read the shape — something like a name, or a direction. But blood was running from the corner of his mouth, and his vocal cords had stopped obeying him.
He used what strength he had left to move one finger.
Pointing toward the north end of the park.
Hibari looked.
He saw wings.
Above the grass on the north side of the park, roughly three meters off the ground, three human shapes hung suspended in the air.
No. Not human.
Wings spread behind them. Black wings — the texture of crow feathers — absorbing every trace of light at that height above the streetlamps. Each pair spanned more than two meters, shifting faintly in the night wind.
Three figures. Three pairs of wings.
The one in front was a woman. Black form-fitting clothing. Long hair moving in the wind. Her right hand was still raised, holding a spear made of light. The tip of that spear was dark red.
Issei Hyoudou's blood.
Two more stood behind her. A man and a woman. The same black wings, the same hovering posture, waiting for some signal.
The woman in front noticed Hibari.
"Hm?" Her voice drifted down from above, carrying the casual indifference of someone who'd spotted an insect that had wandered somewhere it didn't belong. "Another human? Out wandering this late?"
"Lady Raynare, what do we do?" the man behind her asked.
The woman called Raynare tilted her head, studying the high schooler crouched beside Issei Hyoudou.
"We can't leave witnesses." She said it the same way she'd said everything else — easy, unbothered. "We can't have humans going back to report what they've seen."
Hibari stood up.
Slowly. Not from fear. Not from hesitation. He rose slowly because he was looking.
Looking at the spear of light.
Looking at those three pairs of wings.
Looking at what, exactly, these things were.
He had never seen anything like this. Wings were not a human organ. A weapon made of light was not something physical law permitted. Three people floating in the air without any support — this violated everything he knew.
But Kyoya Hibari was not a person who was frightened by things that exceeded common sense.
His mind made a very simple assessment:
— A Kuoh Academy student had been reduced to this condition by these things.
— These things had acted within his patrol area.
Conclusion: bite them to death.
"You—" Hibari's voice was quiet. He raised the tonfa, metal catching a cold gleam from the streetlight below.
Raynare raised an eyebrow. "Oh? Still want to fight back? Foolish human, you have no idea—"
Hibari moved.
He didn't jump toward the sky.
He ran toward the nearest tree. Three strides. The instant his shoe hit the trunk, his body coiled and launched upward like a spring — and then his tonfa carved an arc through the air, driving straight at the temple of the male fallen angel hovering to Raynare's left.
The man had not anticipated a human attacking like this.
The tonfa connected with his temple.
"Gah—!"
The impact didn't sound like metal hitting a body. It was heavier. Denser. Like a hammer striking stone. The fallen angel's body was hurled sideways, his wings losing all balance in the air, and he dropped onto the grass like a kite with a snapped string.
Hibari caught a branch with one hand mid-air, swung once, and landed. Start to finish: under two seconds.
Raynare's expression changed.
"…What are you?"
Hibari didn't answer. He was already moving.
Second target — the female fallen angel to Raynare's right. She was faster than the man, already condensing a spear of light in her hand. But Hibari's speed outpaced her read on him. He wasn't using any special technique. No magic. No supernatural power.
Pure human combat, refined to its absolute limit.
The tonfa was an extension of him. Not a tool — a part of his body.
He slipped past the thrust of the light spear — not a dodge, just the smallest rotation of his torso, letting the spear pass his shoulder close enough to feel the heat — and then his tonfa came up from below and struck the wrist holding the spear.
The sound of bone breaking.
The spear vanished.
Second strike immediately after. The tip of the tonfa landed square in her ribs, bending her body into a bow. Third strike, a horizontal sweep, catching the side of her knee. She went down, her wings spasming against the ground twice, then going still.
Two down.
Hibari's breathing had barely changed. The tonfa was wet with something — not quite blood, darker, with a strange viscosity.
He turned toward Raynare.
Raynare no longer wore the expression she'd had a moment ago.
She looked at her two fallen comrades on the ground, then back at the high schooler standing there with a tonfa, and her face moved through surprise into something deeper — not fear, but confusion. The confusion of *this should not be happening.*
"A human?" Her voice carried weight for the first time. "You're just a human."
"You acted on my territory." Hibari said. The tonfa leveled at her like a verdict. "And—"
He glanced at Issei Hyoudou lying by the fountain.
"—that's one of my school's students."
A new spear of light formed in Raynare's hand. This one was twice the size of the previous ones. The density of the light was higher, the brightness sharper, and the air around it hummed with a low vibration.
"You've made me very unhappy," she said.
Her speed was in a different category from the other two.
When Hibari saw her move, the tonfa was already rising. His reaction was fine. His judgment was fine. His body was fine.
But the force behind the light spear exceeded what his tonfa could absorb.
The instant he blocked, the impact traveled from the tonfa into his arm, from his arm into his shoulder, from his shoulder through his entire body. His shoes skidded back a full meter across the ground. Both hands went numb. A crack appeared in the tonfa — the first time that weapon, which no human had ever managed to damage, had been marked.
"Hm." Hibari looked at the crack.
He didn't step back.
He moved forward again. A direct charge this time. The tonfa swept from the right — a feint. The real attack was a knife-hand strike from his left, aimed at Raynare's throat.
Raynare deflected the tonfa with her spear and blocked his knife-hand with her wing. She used her wing. The force in that black wing was far beyond what he'd calculated. It was like being hit by a car — his entire body was flung three meters back, and he slammed into the stone wall of the fountain.
The pain in his spine blanked his vision for an instant.
But he was back on his feet almost before the impact finished registering. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. He didn't know if he'd bitten his tongue when he was thrown, or if the impact had rattled something internal.
Raynare landed on the ground. Her wings folded, but the spear remained in her hand.
"You're interesting," she said. The high, detached ease had returned to her voice. "A normal human would die from a single graze of my light spear. You actually blocked it. But—"
She raised the spear toward him.
"—you are still only human."
Second spear.
This time Hibari didn't block. He turned sideways and cleared the tip, but the trailing edge of the light — he didn't know what to call it — grazed his left arm.
Pain.
Like a red-hot iron rod pressed directly against skin. The sleeve of his uniform burned through instantly, exposing the charred skin beneath. The smell of scorched protein drifted through the air.
His left hand went temporarily numb.
One hand.
The tonfa was still in his right.
Hibari adjusted his grip — one-handed. The weight of the tonfa shifted in his right palm, moving from the balance point for two-handed combat to the center of gravity for single-handed thrusting.
This was not the first time he had kept fighting while injured. In the time before he became Disciplinary Committee Chairman, in the months when he was clearing every delinquent faction from the area around Kuoh Academy, he had broken fingers, cracked ribs, taken a knife across his back.
Not once had any of it put him down.
But this opponent was not human.
The third spear came from above. Hibari planted the tonfa against the ground and rolled sideways — the spear hit the stone plaza and blasted a half-meter crater in it. Fragments of stone raked across his face, opening several cuts.
Fourth spear.
He couldn't clear it.
The light spear passed through his right side. Not a direct hit — he'd twisted his body at the last instant, letting the tip pass through from the side rather than punching straight through the front. But the pain was like every nerve in his body igniting at once, and for the first time his knees hit the ground.
The tonfa fell.
The sound of metal on stone rang out across the silent park and carried far.
Raynare looked down at Hibari kneeling on the ground.
"It's over," she said. "You're the most tenacious human I've ever seen. If you were something supernatural, I might find you genuinely interesting. But you're just a person—"
Hibari's hand reached for the tonfa.
His fingers found the metal. Closed around it.
He used the tonfa to push himself back to his feet.
His right side was bleeding. His left arm was burned. The blood from the corner of his mouth had reached his chin. The front of his white dress shirt was half red. His breathing was unsteady for the first time — but he was standing.
He stood and looked at Raynare.
"…What are you?" Something entered Raynare's voice that she herself hadn't noticed was there.
Hibari didn't answer.
His vision was beginning to blur. Too much blood lost. The limits of his body — the limits of a human body — had been reached. The tonfa felt suddenly heavy. He could feel his knees shaking, but his will would not allow him to go down again.
He would not kneel.
That was his rule.
A final spear of light formed in Raynare's hand.
She said nothing more. No lines this time. No mockery. She simply raised the spear in silence. There was something in her expression — something she might not have had a name for — that looked almost like respect, or something close to regret.
The spear drove toward Hibari's chest.
Red light.
Before the spear reached him, a burst of red radiance erupted from his left.
Hibari didn't know what it was. His vision was already failing. He only saw red — deep red, the color of blood — spreading through the air and forming a pattern like a magic circle.
Then someone stepped out of that red light.
Red hair, long.
Pale skin.
A school uniform — Kuoh Academy's girls' uniform.
Rias Gremory.
President of the Occult Research Club. The owner of the luxury sedan whose license plate he had noted that morning at the school gate.
She stood between Hibari and Raynare.
"Stop." Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried an absolute weight. "This is my territory — the territory of Rias Gremory."
Raynare let the spear dissolve. Her expression shifted — the casual indifference replaced by something that looked like *this is a problem.*
"The Gremory family's…" she murmured something under her breath, then spread her wings.
She looked at the two fallen angels Hibari had put on the ground.
Then she flew away.
Taking the two who could no longer move, she disappeared into the night sky.
Hibari's consciousness was nearly gone.
He watched Rias Gremory's back as she walked toward Issei Hyoudou and crouched beside him. Something appeared in her hand — small pieces, like chess pieces, red, glowing faintly in her palm.
"There's no time… I'll have to use reincarnation." Her voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere very far away.
Then she turned and looked at Hibari.
Their eyes met across the dark.
There was a great deal in Rias's gaze. Shock at the human high schooler who had injured two fallen angels. And something else — a calculation, calm and precise, like someone assessing the value of a piece on a board.
"You're almost dead too," she said.
Hibari didn't answer. Not because he didn't want to — his vocal cords had stopped obeying him. Too much blood lost. His brain had begun protectively shutting down non-essential functions.
"I can save you." Rias stood, more chess pieces in her hand. "But when you wake up — you won't be human anymore."
Hibari's eyes were still on her.
Even at the edge of losing consciousness, there was no fear in those eyes. No pleading. No wavering of any kind.
He was simply watching.
Watching what this woman standing in the light of a red magic circle was going to do.
Rias crouched in front of him. She reached out and placed one of the pieces — a Rook — against his chest.
"In the name of Rias Gremory, I command you—"
Red light enveloped Hibari's body.
Warmth. Like being submerged in warm water. The pain was receding. The wound in his side was closing. The burned skin on his left arm was rebuilding itself.
But at the same time, something was changing.
He could feel it.
In the last moment before consciousness left him, Kyoya Hibari felt the way his heart was beating change. The frequency, the force, the rhythm — all of it different from before.
Like a new engine had been installed.
Then everything went dark.
That night, the Disciplinary Committee Chairman of Kuoh Academy stopped being human.