Chapter 5: The Tomb of Stoicism

The clock on the Student Council building read three fifty-five in the afternoon. Ren was leaning against the brick wall, eyes fixed on the minute hand, a plastic wrapper crinkling between his fingers.

At four sharp, the door opened. Tsubaki Shinra stepped into the hallway, adjusting the folder under her left arm. She stopped in front of him, glanced at her wristwatch, and then locked her eyes on the package Ren was holding.

"Punctual, Akatsuki-san," she said in the cold, precise tone she used for everything, from announcing the start of patrol to denying shift-change requests. "Five minutes early, to be exact."

"Hunger is the best motivator for punctuality, senpai," Ren replied, tearing the plastic open with his teeth. The sweet, sugary scent of melon bread filled the corridor. "Four minutes and fifty seconds. I'm timing my incentive."

Tsubaki let out a short sigh, a sound that was becoming something of a tradition between them, though she didn't protest. She crossed her arms and waited in silence while Ren took the first bite with the calm of a king.

"President Sitri spent the entire morning going over the infirmary reports on Hyoudou," Tsubaki commented, breaking the silence as she looked out toward the courtyard through the window. "The boy's right arm shows no trace of cellular, muscular, or skeletal damage. The school physicians say his mystical energy channels were left so clean it looked like the arm of an ordinary human, as if he'd never had a Sacred Gear at all."

"I flipped his switch off, I already told her," Ren muttered with his mouth half full. "If you leave a lamp on for three years straight, the wiring overheats. I just gave the circuit a break."

"Sona thinks what you do isn't blocking energy," Tsubaki said, glancing at him sideways. "It's something worse. It's as if you rewrote the space around it so the magic just decides to stop existing."

Ren chewed, swallowed, and looked at the last piece of bread.

"Magic likes to complicate things. I just put them back the way they were."

"And Hyoudou didn't complain?"

"He complained four times. The first three out loud, the fourth with a look." Ren finished the bread in one bite. "But the pain dropped off in ten seconds, so he processed it his own way and we moved on."

Tsubaki looked at him a moment longer than usual before turning her gaze back to the courtyard.

"The president wants a formal statement from you about the procedure."

"Tell her the procedure's intuitive and doesn't have a technical name. That should give her material for a form at least five pages long."

"She's already drafting Form G," Tsubaki replied, without the faintest trace of irony. "It's eight."

The bell announcing four o'clock rang across the campus. Ren crumpled the wrapper and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

"Time," Tsubaki declared, unrolling her folder. "Patrol begins. North wing first."

The north wing housed the old laboratories and the gardening club's tool shed, a wooded zone that bordered directly on the mystical barriers Sona Sitri maintained to hide the academy from human eyes. At that hour, the sun was slanting low, dyeing the leaves of the trees a thick orange that made everything look more peaceful than it probably was.

They walked in a silence that the crunch of dry branches under their shoes was busy filling in. Tsubaki kept half a step ahead, pen ready over the daily report sheet, noting the absence of anomalies with a focus Ren found, in its own way, fairly admirable. She'd been doing this for weeks, more than a hundred patrols before he'd ever shown up, and she still took notes with the same exactness as on the first day.

She walks like she's inspecting troops in a barracks, Ren thought, watching her from behind with his hands buried in his pockets to hide that his gaze was drifting more than it should. The sway of her jet-black hair, cut in a perfectly symmetrical hime-cut, had a rhythm of its own with every step, and Tsubaki, with her military posture, the spotless uniform skirt, and that frozen seriousness behind her glasses, had a severe kind of attractiveness that wasn't doing his pulse any favors. If she smiled half as much as she writes, she'd have the entire second-year wing breaking the rules on purpose just so she'd drag them to the office by the tie. God bless this academy's dress code, even if it's a one-way ticket to hell for looking too long.

Then Ren's wrist began to vibrate.

It wasn't the rhythmic, curious pulse Issei gave off, nor the elegant fire that came from Rias Gremory. It was a violent tug, a cold jolt that left the fingers of his right hand numb, and the silver patterns under his sleeve heated up all at once.

"Shinra," Ren said, stopping dead in his tracks.

Tsubaki didn't need to ask. Her own mystical radar lit up a second later, and the air around her grew dense and heavy, with a rancid stench of sulfur and burnt flesh rising up from the forest floor.

"Disturbance on the perimeter barrier," she declared, letting the folder go to hover in the air, held up by a faint glow of her own magic. "Something **** its way in from outside. Low-level presence, but unstable."

Behind the tool shed, the brush rustled, and a creature the size of a wolf came crawling out, dragging its claws through the dirt. It wasn't a demon of any faction; it was a minor stray, some sort of supernatural vermin with deformed, grayish skin, covered in small eyes that opened and closed at random as if the beast couldn't decide what it wanted to look at. The black saliva dripping from its teeth corroded the grass on contact.

Tsubaki stepped forward, extending her right hand. A magic circle bearing the Sitri House crest began to form in the air, glowing with a cold blue light.

"Stand back, Akatsuki-san. This requires official containment and the filing of Intrusion Form Model D. I need to immobilize it to analyze the source of the breach."

"Senpai," Ren said, watching the beast, "your circle takes three seconds to close, and that thing's planning to eat the greenhouse. If it breaks the glass, Sona's going to make you fill out Form B for structural damage."

Tsubaki hesitated for a fraction of a second. The monster used that opening and launched itself forward with a low roar, straight at the barrier she was barely weaving together.

Ren didn't take any kind of combat stance; he simply walked three steps, passed Tsubaki's line, and stretched out his right hand palm-open, intercepting the creature's path. There was no chant and no magic circle of any kind.

When the stray's jaws met his fingers, a silver flash, thin and sharp as the edge of a needle, cut through the air. The impact made no sound. The beast's many eyes went wide, and the chaotic aura of sulfur wrapped around it dispersed like smoke blown apart by the wind. The stray didn't explode; it simply began to come apart into an inert gray dust that fell onto the soil, erased from space the way cheap ink smudges away under a fingertip, until the courtyard smelled of fresh grass and autumn afternoon again.

Ren brushed off his hands and put them back in his pockets.

"Zero damage," he said, looking at the clean ground. "Saved you the three pages."

Tsubaki slowly lowered her hand, dissolving her magic circle. Her eyes stayed fixed on the spot where the monster had vanished. She'd seen high-class demons unleash mass-destruction magic before, but this was different; nothing was left, no mystical residue, no ash, not even the lingering smell of sulfur. The "Eraser Effect" at its absolute peak, and something about that total absence struck her as more unsettling than any explosion she'd ever witnessed.

"You... really have no mercy for the structure of magic," she murmured.

"Mercy generates too much paperwork," he replied, turning away.

"My, my. What an absolutely clean job, Ren-kun."

The voice, soft and laced with a dangerous amusement, came from the shadow of the old oak at the edge of the woods.

Rias Gremory was standing there, arms folded under her chest, her crimson hair shining in the late afternoon backlight.

This is a crime against the textile industry, Ren thought right away, dragging his eyes away half a second too late. The seams on that uniform are doing more containment work than Sona's barriers.

Beside her, Akeno Himejima held a folder against her hip, her violet eyes shining with the kind of curiosity Ren had already learned to file under "silent high-category threat."

"Buchou," Tsubaki said, going rigid at once. "The incident falls under the Disciplinary Committee's jurisdiction. The breach has already been neutralized."

"I saw it, Tsubaki-senpai, and it was a fascinating spectacle," Rias said, taking a few steps toward them. "But according to the coexistence treaty we signed with Sona, any anomaly involving an external threat on the north perimeter borders directly on the grounds assigned to the Occult Research Club."

She stopped in front of Ren, looking down at him with a smile that carried the weight of a high-noble order dressed up as politeness.

"And under our agreement, Ren is a Free Agent under my House's protection. Since his power was the one that interacted with the threat, I have the right and the duty to question him to make sure there's no mystical contamination in his system."

Tsubaki narrowed her eyes.

"President Sitri hasn't authorized the transfer of a sanctioned member of the Committee."

"Oh, Sona won't find out if I have him back before five-thirty," Akeno cut in.

The black-haired girl stepped forward, closing the distance with Ren until he could smell the sweet, almost intoxicating scent on her skin. Akeno leaned slightly forward, tilting her head with a smile that didn't reach her eyes but tore down defenses anyway. The collar of her blouse fell open just enough to reveal a view that left Ren's mouth bone-dry.

Lord, give me strength because the flesh is weak and those uniforms are two sizes too small on both of them, Ren thought, calling on every gram of stoicism available to keep his eyes locked strictly ahead. The problem was that "ahead" meant looking at Tsubaki, and Tsubaki with her rigid posture, the impeccable skirt, and that frozen seriousness behind her glasses wasn't helping his pulse either. Great, I'm voluntarily walking into my own interrogation, surrounded by high-noble demons playing temptress and a disciplinary vice-president who could strangle me with a look, and who, to top it all off, looks unfairly good doing it. Melon bread, this is your fault.

"Besides," Akeno went on, visibly enjoying his stiffness, "we've got fresh mango tea and chocolate cookies waiting at the club. It'd be rude to let the hero of the afternoon leave on an empty stomach, don't you think, Ren-kun?"

Ren exhaled the breath he hadn't realized he was holding and looked up at the orange clouds that were starting to darken. His wrist gave one last pulse, no longer a warning, which he chose to read as resignation.

"Senpai," he said to Tsubaki, his voice an octave lower than usual, "does the form for reporting that I was kidnapped by a red-haired witch and her sadistic accomplice run three pages or five?"

"Three," Tsubaki replied, stone-faced. "And the accomplice form's four."

"Then I'll go quietly," Ren sighed. "Talking about paperwork in a forest is making me hungry, and frankly, I need a distraction that doesn't involve cleavage."

Rias widened her smile and turned to lead the way to the old school building.

"Excellent choice, Akatsuki-kun. Let's see how well your silver holds up to the heat of our club."

The old building of Kuoh sat at the opposite end of the north wing, separated from the main body of the academy by a tree-lined courtyard that looked picturesque by day and at dusk took on the look of something out of a horror movie. Ren crossed that courtyard with his hands in his pockets and his eyes glued to the cobblestone path, mentally measuring every step so he wouldn't end up staring at what was in front of him.

The problem was that what was in front of him happened to be Rias Gremory and Akeno Himejima walking side by side, and the universe had decided that textile physics would work in especially cruel ways whenever they both moved with the breeze.

Focus. Cobblestones have centuries of history, the Romans perfected this, Caesar walked on something like it, Shakespeare wrote something about Caesar, that's literature, those are intellectual and very respectable things. Do not look up.

It didn't work, because Akeno turned her head at exactly the right moment and caught him staring at the ground with a focus that clearly wasn't natural.

"Worried about the ants, Ren-kun?" she asked, in that soft voice that sounded like poisoned honey.

"I respect them deeply," Ren replied without lifting his eyes. "They're hardworking and they don't ask me awkward questions."

Rias, two steps ahead, just smiled toward the front.

"You're gonna need that stamina once we get to the club," she said. "I've got some very specific questions about what you did this afternoon."

"I thought the incentive was the mango tea."

"The tea's the courtesy," Akeno cut in. "The questions are the price of entry."

Great. I'm voluntarily walking into my own interrogation. The melon bread's entirely to blame.

The Occult Research Club's room smelled of black tea, old wood, and something indefinable Ren mentally tagged as "the collective aura of people who know too much and enjoy it." The walls were lined with bookshelves holding titles that would've made most of the supernatural researchers he knew break out in a sweat, and at the center of the room sat a table big enough for formal meetings that clearly never got used for anything formal.

Koneko Toujou was sitting at one end of the table with a math textbook open in front of her, and she looked up when Ren walked in with the same expression she'd have worn if a chair had walked in. Yuuto Kiba, leaning by the window with a book in hand, gave Ren a polite smile that Ren returned with a nod.

Issei Hyoudou was standing by the back wall, his right arm bent upward as if he were testing its range of motion, and when his eyes met Ren's they stayed there for exactly three seconds.

"Arm," Ren said.

"Arm," Issei confirmed.

"How's it feel?"

"Like it got reset." Issei slowly lowered the arm, no obvious pain. "No spark. Nothing. It's like wearing the gauntlet but the gauntlet's not answering."

"The Boosted Gear's coming back," Ren said, sitting down in the chair Akeno gestured to with a small nod. "I shut off the interference, not the system. It needs a few hours to recalibrate without the overheating piled on top."

Issei looked at him.

"How do you know how long it takes?"

"I don't know for sure, but the Boosted Gear's energy has a pretty recognizable rhythm of its own, and yours started pulsing again this morning." Ren accepted the cup Akeno set down in front of him without his having asked. "By this afternoon you should have it back at a hundred percent."

Issei processed that, and the mix of relief and bewilderment that crossed his face was honest enough to come off as funny.

"So you helped me," he said, as if the conclusion took some effort to reach.

"I gave you a break you needed. It's not exactly the same thing."

Rias took her place at the head of the table with the ease of someone who's never considered sitting anywhere else, rested her hands on the wood, and looked at Ren with an attention he found more interesting than he was letting on.

"What you did to the stray," she began, "didn't leave any kind of energy residue. Not even a dispersed field."

"Right."

"That isn't magical suppression." Rias tilted her head slightly. "Suppression displaces energy. What you do removes it from the equation."

"More or less."

"More or less in which direction?"

Ren took a sip of the tea before answering. It was mango, all right, and well brewed, which was about the only thing in the situation that couldn't be argued with.

"In the direction that I don't have a technical name for it that's gonna fit into any system your faction uses to classify powers," he said. "If you wanna document it, you'll have to make up a new category."

"That doesn't sound like a problem to me," Rias replied.

"It isn't for me either." Ren set the cup down. "The problem comes if someone decides a new category needs special regulation, and then I've got two Student Councils and a demonic faction generating paperwork on me at the same time."

Kiba let out a short breath that was as close as he got to laughing without warning. Koneko kept her eyes on the math.

Akeno leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table and resting her chin on her hands, with a smile that had the collar of her blouse performing precisely the kind of structural engineering Ren had already filed away as "constant passive threat."

"And what if we promised you discretion, Ren-kun?" she said, in a voice that turned the bureaucratic question into something else entirely.

The tea's really good, Ren thought, looking at his cup with renewed attention. I'm gonna study this tea very carefully for the next few seconds.

"I already have discretion," he replied, without looking up from the cup. "What I don't have is infinite patience for an interrogation dressed up as hospitality."

Rias's smile widened.

"It isn't an interrogation. It's an operational compatibility evaluation."

"How many pages does the operational compatibility form run?"

"There isn't a form." Rias leaned back in her chair with a movement that conveyed exactly the amount of authority she meant to convey. "Just questions."

"One, then."

"One for now." Rias looked at him with the calm of someone who already has the answer and is only checking whether the person across from her knows it too. "When was the last time your power ran into something it couldn't erase?"

The room went silent. Koneko briefly raised her eyes from the math before lowering them again. Kiba shut his book slowly.

Ren set the cup down on the table and looked at Rias.

"That," he said, "isn't an operational compatibility question."

"No," Rias confirmed. "That's the real question."

Ren's wrist gave a soft, almost absent pulse, and then went still.

Yeah, he thought, addressing nothing in particular and something very specific at the same time. I know.

"Have me back before five-thirty," Ren said, looking at Rias again. "And I'll discuss the answer when the context justifies it, not before."

Rias watched him for a moment before nodding, and in that pause there was something that wasn't quite acceptance but wasn't pressure either; it was the recognition of someone who'd played enough long games to know when to wait her turn.

"All right, Akatsuki-kun." She turned to Akeno. "Pour him another cup."

Akeno was already pouring, with a smile that promised the next question was going to be even more inconvenient than the first, and the afternoon sun kept slanting in over the trees outside the courtyard, dyeing the leaves an orange that, seen from inside the club, looked perfectly peaceful.

Which, at this academy, meant the afternoon hadn't decided yet what it wanted to be.