So yeah, this is getting a complete rebuild. I realized that the original had the constant problem of taking the spotlight away from Issei and also not changing nearly as much as I'd think it should, especially with what a certain character was stated to get up to for centuries at a time. As a result, this iteration is far more focused on Issei himself and his growing strength, while also having a number of differences from canon that will be apparent very quickly.
I do not own Highschool DxD.
At some point in their lives, most humans possess some fear of the darkness. The absence of light within a space terrifies many of those who seek the embrace of the sun. For all but a few, of course, it is not the shadow itself that frightens. Instead, it is what may be disguised, hidden within the gloom. For most, this fear never entirely vanishes; why else would so many films utilize shadows with the intent to cause that exact sensation, to disguise the monster, the murderer or the horrific shock?
As one might expect, Issei Hyoudou's first emotion upon finding himself within a seemingly endless expanse of darkness was anxiety – one which only grew worse with every passing moment. It was not just the fear of something leaping out and attacking him that sent the teen's anxiety into overdrive. As he examined his memories in a steadily-rising panic, the brown-haired seventeen-year old realized that he had no idea how he had come to be here, or any clue where "here" might be. No area in Kuoh (or anywhere else, for that matter) was ever this dark.
Instinctively, Issei began to yell. "Hey! I-Is anyone there?! Hello?!" For more than a minute this went on, the brunette screaming everything he could think of to get someone's attention. There had to be someone around here, didn't there?
But the darkness swallowed his cries for help and offered no response in turn.
Not sure what else to do, Issei began to move forwards, first at a walk, then at a run.
He would've sworn he wasn't changing position... until he crashed headlong into something very, very hard.
Issei's sharp cry of pain echoed through the blackness as he fell flat on his back, and one hand found his forehead.
Once the neon sparks stopped blinding him, Issei shakily stood once more, and against better judgment reached towards what hit him.
For a moment, his fingers met nothing but the empty air, and Issei wondered if whatever he'd hit had moved aside in the thirty seconds or so since he'd fallen.
Then, under his fingertips, Issei felt the same hard substance with which he'd collided. One moment of sliding his fingers down it sent them jerking backwards, the body to which they were attached doing the same a fraction of a moment later.
It wasn't some wall that he'd crashed into. That would've made some degree of sense. No, whatever it was that he'd touched didn't have the feel of brick or mortar or concrete. The things he'd touched were undeniably scales.
Whatever he'd crashed into, it was some enormous beast hidden in the darkness. Even as he stepped back, he could hear the immense, scaled creature shift, the sound of massive weight crashing through Issei's ears. Instinctively, he turned – and immediately froze.
Where before, there had been only endless darkness, there was now a very thin, faint silver glow, hanging in midair.
Even as Issei watched it, the glow grew from a thin crescent into a large oval shape. As it did so, the glow grew brighter, until Issei was able to perceive his own flesh in the darkness.
The brunette stared into the silver light for several seconds, unsure of what to do or how to react. It wasn't until he noticed something out of the corner of his eye that he even blinked. His head turned a moment later.
Three or so feet away, another glow of the same kind was forming, taking the same shape and form as the first.
Issei's eyes darted both ways as he tried in vain to keep both in his sights. Issei had no idea what in the hell was going on here, but he wanted out and he wanted out now.
Then equidistant between them, a third light took the same shape as the first two. Just moments after it had finished expanding, a slow, long and low rumble echoed through Issei's ears.
It took a few moments to realize that it wasn't just any rumble; it was the growl of this colossal creature behind him. His head swung, but the trio of lights did not reach that far; all he saw was the impenetrable black stretching out behind him.
Stuck between the fearful trio of lights and the scaled beast behind him, Issei found himself muttering feverishly beneath his breath.
"If this is a nightmare, please let me wake up...!"
He didn't expect a response, but he received one all the same.
"Would this be such?"
The voice that spoke seemed to come from everywhere. It was scratchy but absurdly deep, far deeper than any natural voice he'd ever heard.
"Uh... yes?" Issei found himself replying.
A low snort filled Issei's ears. "So... you are the next...?"
"Who are you?" Issei demanded, if fearfully. "What do you mean, "the next"?"
"Return to rest's oblivion, child... all will be revealed... in time..."
One by one, the trio of silver lights went out.
Issei's eyes snapped open, and almost instantly he became aware of the cold sweat he was drenched in.
What in the hell was that about?
It was the third of the incredibly vivid nightmares he'd had in three nights, and he was already more than sick of them. First, there had been that one where the brunette had gotten a girlfriend, only for her to murder him at the end of the first date. But before that, she'd...
He shivered as he remembered the enormous crow-like wings that had torn loose from her back. The spear that she'd skewered him with... he would have sworn it was constructed from pure light, even though that was obviously impossible. And the pain... oh dear God, the pain... He could still feel it if he thought about it, even now.
Then there was the second one, with that guy in the trench coat doing the same damn thing to him. At least that one had had a happier outcome, what with the hottest girl in the school showing up to save his life with a few well-placed words.
And now there was this dream of an infinite black void, silver lights and an unseen scaled creature. Why the hell had his brain become so set on screwing with him this way? What on earth had he done wrong?
Then, as he sat up and rubbed at his eyes, he heard a voice he never thought he'd hear.
"You're finally awake, then?"
His head flicked over to the source of the voice, brain denying that it could possibly be.
But it was, and there she sat, at his desk.
Rias Gremory was a gorgeous young woman – every pupil that attended Kuoh Academy would agree with that. Her skin was flawless and just the right tone of pale to make a beautiful contrast against her red hair that extended down her back. And then, of course, there was that massive chest of hers. Dressed in her tight school uniform, it was a most prominent feature, bouncing and swaying with her every movement.
"My eyes are up here."
His embarrassment at being called out was enough to get his brown eyes focused on hers. When he looked into them, however...
Why the hell did she look afraid of him?
"I'll make this brief," Rias said, her tone unnaturally hurried. "My name is Rias Gremory, and I'm a Devil. I'm also your master." A forced smile came across her lips. "Good to meet you, Issei Hyoudou."
"Wait, what?" Issei said, confused and trying to make sense of this scene before him. "Devil? Master? What are you-"
Rias raised a hand, cutting him off. "I'll explain everything after class today. You and I have school to get to, do we not?" That same forced smile came over her face again. "Don't be late."
She stood up a little too quickly for Issei's liking, and any thoughts that would normally have invaded his head about her breasts bouncing about didn't manifest.
Issei's jaw dropped as a glowing circle appeared beneath her feet. It was a bright crimson, with a rose-like shape set into it.
"I'll send someone to fetch you after class," Rias said.
Then, a flash of light enveloped her.
When it faded, she was gone, and so was the circle.
For several minutes after Rias Gremory apparently warped out of his bedroom, Issei's thoughts ran wild in lightning-fast and unfocused trains. They bounced about, none sticking on any others or in his conscious mind long enough to be processed and analyzed.
The only conclusion he could draw was the obvious: Two unbelievably vivid dreams of being murdered and then one about a meeting with an unseen creature in the black just before he woke up with Rias Gremory sitting at his desk and calling herself his "master" couldn't be a coincidence.
"Issei?"
It was only at the sound of his mother's voice that Issei finally snapped back to reality.
"Yeah, I'm up!" Issei called. "Just getting dressed! Give me a few minutes!"
As he haphazardly threw his clothes on, Issei reflected on the nightmares and this morning a bit more.
Issei had known something was wrong the moment he sat down at the breakfast table.
His parents were there, as always, but it was as though a wall had come up between himself and his parents. Their words were terse – not maliciously so, but the sort of words someone might use if they were afraid of who they were speaking to. Not once throughout the meal did the teen's own parents look him in the eye.
By the time breakfast finished, Issei only wished he could go back to bed, fall back asleep and forget the whole morning.
And when he stepped out the door and into the sun, he immediately felt even worse.
Sure, he was a teenager and wasn't exactly a morning person. But he'd never felt physical discomfort simply from being in the sunlight before. Actually, scratch discomfort. He felt straight-out weak. What the hell had happened to his body?
It wasn't a crippling pain by any means, but he desperately wanted to get inside and out of the sun, to a degree that Issei knew wasn't natural.
That pain made the walk to school feel much longer than it should have, and things didn't get any better when he arrived.
Kuoh Academy had been an all-girls school at one point not too long ago, and the ratio of male-to-female students still weighed heavily in favor of the ladies. Sure, it eased up the further down the grades one went, but girls still made up the majority of the population. For a pervert like him, this had seemed perfect, and he'd done more studying than ever before or since to make sure he got in.
He had rather failed to consider, so blinded was he with his dream of building a harem, that most girls found perverted boys rather annoying. Not that he'd ever come to that conclusion on his own.
In other words, he was used to being looked at by the average girl as though he was something she had scraped off the bottom of her shoe, and expected that when he encountered a small group of them outside the gate.
Yet as he drew near, the expected disgust quickly transformed into barely hidden fear, just like what had been on Rias' face.
"Uh..."
Issei didn't get out more than that before the girls had collectively darted into the school.
First Rias and now this...?
What the hell was going on?
The school day didn't get any better from there.
Matsuda and Motohama, two teenagers just as perverted as Issei himself, not to mention his only friends, had the same fearful look, and seemed to be making excuses to stay away from him. Even asking them if they wanted to go spy on the ladies' locker room was a request they denied, leaving Issei shocked. The only meaningful human interaction they had with him was to tell him that they had no idea who "Yuuma" was.
The other students weren't any better. Every single other person in the school seemed deathly afraid of him, even if literally no one would come out and say it. Issei had grown more and more aggravated with every second that passed, and by the very last period of the day wanted absolutely nothing but to go home, hide in bed and forget today had happened. Only the memory of Rias Gremory's words kept him from leaving his final classroom.
Issei could only hope that she might be able to explain what was going on.
The teacher of his final class didn't stick around much longer than his students, and Issei could only guess that he was the reason for that. Everyone and everything wanted to be as far away from him as possible.
As he stared out the window into the late afternoon sky, Issei's thoughts turned back once more to the nightmare he'd had the night before. He analyzed the details again, from the darkness itself to the feel of the scales beneath his skin to the trio of enormous silver lights.
More than all else, however, was the voice. That deep, booming voice that put the deepest human voices he'd ever heard to shame. Every word that voice had spoken had left Issei feeling as though he was being shaken to the core of his soul. The few words it had spoken were formal and rather old-fashioned in its wording. No person he'd ever encountered in his day-to-day life spoke in a way that even remotely resembled that voice, nor did any fictional character.
Even as Issei sat there, recalling the details of that nightmare and the other two, he became less and less convinced they were nightmares.
Perhaps it was just some frustration boiling over and demanding an explanation. In fact, that seemed more likely. Yet Issei was seventeen, and he knew full well that no dream he'd ever had prior to the last three was a fraction as vivid as those three had been. Yet he'd awoken in bed with no injuries in the previous two cases, so they must have been, right?
That, however, still left the final one – the one in the dark with the scaled beast. And that defied the easy negation of the prior two. That voice had said that "all would be revealed in time", hadn't it?
I hope it's got a really good explanation, then...
"Issei Hyoudou?"
For the third time that day, Issei was yanked out of his thoughts by a familiar voice. He turned his head to the source of the words.
Yuuto Kiba was the complete opposite of Issei in most ways. He was quite the handsome teen, kind and courteous to all and beloved by the girls of Kuoh Academy.
In other words, he was someone Issei detested any other day. Today, however, Issei didn't care enough to spare him much of an extra glance.
He only needed one to see the fear hidden behind the forced smile.
"So," Issei said, keeping his eyes elsewhere, "where are we going? I assume you were sent to fetch me by Rias."
Kiba nodded. "One of the old buildings. Follow me."
Issei had been at Kuoh Academy for more than a year, and he knew full well that there were several old, abandoned buildings on the campus, hidden away among the trees. It was a rather large campus, and Issei had always thought that perhaps the old buildings just hadn't provided enough room for the swelling population.
He had not, however, ever been inside any of them. He'd always assumed they were simply abandoned and in disrepair, blighted structures that somehow avoided simply being demolished outright.
When Kiba opened the door to one of them, however, Issei was quite surprised to find the entrance the foyer was well-maintained. The wood had clearly been cleaned recently, and Issei couldn't find a single scratch on it.
"Didn't know these buildings still had power," Issei commented.
"They don't," Kiba said.
As Issei looked up, he realized that it was quite true – there were no light fixtures anywhere inside the room, and the windows were boarded over. Yet he had no difficulty seeing.
Issei remembered the night before last, and the dream. He remembered seeing so clearly in the dark.
He was becoming increasingly convinced that those things weren't nightmares. Or at least, the second one wasn't.
The first one still hurt just to think about.
Shaking his head, Issei followed Kiba up the stairs and down one of the doors on the balcony.
After several hallways, Issei found himself facing a large set of double doors.
"This is the meeting room of the Occult Research Club," Kiba said, attempting to be friendly and failing horribly to hide his fear.
"I see..."
The room was rather large, clearly having been a classroom at one point in its existence. Three couches were set out around three sides of a central, rectangular table, while on the one side without a couch, a large desk sat set with books and papers. A number of bookshelves were set along the walls, while the entire room was lit by the dying sun creeping in through an open window.
Issei was quite surprised to recognize the person seated on the couch.
The white-haired Koneko Toujou was snacking on a plate of some pastry or another. When he voiced a greeting, she looked at up at him, said a quick "Hello", and went back to her food.
At the very least, her facial features didn't appear frightened. Then again, they didn't appear to have any emotions in them at all.
"The new guy, huh?"
An unfamiliar voice made Issei look up once more.
At the window stood a boy with black hair, cut in a short, practical style. As he walked over, Issei noted the calm, yet friendly swagger of his posture. And as he drew closer, Issei was quite surprised by the look on his face.
He didn't appear afraid in the slightest.
"Don't worry, I won't bite," he said, his voice warm and friendly. "I'm Ryuji Kisaragi, the vice-president of the Occult Research Club."
"Issei Hyoudou," the brunette said. There wasn't much happiness in his tone.
"The president should be back fairly soon," Kiba said, taking a seat. "She just needs to finish up her phone call home. Just pick a spot on one of the couches and we can wait for her here. It shouldn't be more than a couple of minutes."
Issei nodded.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Rias said as she sat down. "The phone call took a little longer than I thought it would."
Kiba had been right; it didn't take more than about two minutes before the red-haired beauty that was Rias Gremory had stepped in through another door and sat down at the desk. Yet even as she did so with practiced grace, Issei could see the fear in her eyes.
"Not a problem," Issei said.
"Anyway," Rias said, "let's get straight to the point, shall we? You remember, Issei, when I said I was a Devil this morning?"
Issei nodded.
"Well, I'm not the only one here," Rias said, waving her hand towards the rest of the club. "The other three are as well."
Issei's head snapped back and forth, taking in the faces of his fellow students in shock.
"And now, Issei Hyoudou, so are you."
Issei turned to look at her so fast he was mildly surprised that his vertebrae didn't dislocate. "Me? A Devil?"
Rias smiled. "Indeed you are, Issei."
Issei's eyes widened as what were unmistakably wings tore loose from the backs of the four other students present. They weren't like the wings of Yuuma or the man who had speared him through. Both were black, but the strangers were like those of crows, feathered and filthy. These, on the other hand, were thin and bat-like.
As he looked at them, Issei became aware of a new sensation in his own torso. After a few seconds, he turned his head.
From his own back extended a pair of wings – ones identical to those protruding from his fellow students' flesh.
As Issei struggled to get his breathing under control, Rias spoke again. "I'm sure you've been wondering about the things that you've probably fobbed off as dreams – the man in the coat?"
"He was real, wasn't he?" Issei asked.
"Yes," Rias said. "As was everything else you've experienced. The man in the coat was what's known as a "Fallen Angel" - an Angel from Heaven who's been corrupted by their own sinful desires. They're called "the watchers of the children of God". In other words, the world's Sacred Gear possessors... or at least, they're supposed to be."
"Sacred Gear?" Issei asked dumbly.
Rias nodded. "Sacred Gear. They're tools created by God and fused with a human's soul at conception. They grant a human some power or powers. It's different for every Sacred Gear."
"Uh... why? Why'd God make these things?"
Rias shrugged. "No one's entirely sure. As I was saying, the Fallen Angels watch over Sacred Gear possessors – that includes you, Issei. You have one, and I realized it as soon as I found you. Remember this?" She picked up a slip of paper from the stack on her desk.
Issei blinked as he looked at it, recognized it. "That's... the paper I got from that girl before my date..."
It was emblazoned with a circle, drawn in a style that explicitly recalled the occult. Along the bottom was a line of text saying "Your wish can be granted!"
"That was my familiar, more than likely," Rias said. "I have her take human form and hand out fliers pretty often. She wasn't seeking out you, specifically, just in case you're wondering. Just anyone who'd take one. I'll explain later, as we have something else to do."
"Which is?"
"Stand up for me, Issei. Take a few steps back."
Issei did so, growing more and more suspicious with every second that passed.
"Now then, Issei," Rias said once he'd stood, "I want you to shut your eyes, focus on the concept of power. Imagine pure strength. Think about where you feel strongest and concentrate on that area growing stronger."
Issei obeyed, despite not knowing why he was doing this. What, was this connected to this "Sacred Gear" he supposedly possessed?
The brunette stood there for several seconds, not sure exactly where felt strongest. His thoughts went to things he'd seen on television, to automobiles to the stars themselves, yet nothing happened.
Then, out of nowhere, he heard a voice that sounded awfully familiar, preceded by a raspy breath.
Behind the shoulder blades... is the most common...
Issei's eyes flew open. "Who said that?"
The other members of the club blinked at him, trying to stifle the nervousness in their faces.
"No one's said anything, Issei," Rias said, obviously confused.
Issei shook his head. "Must've been my imagination." He shut his eyes again after telling this lie.
In truth, Issei knew that voice. He'd been hearing what little it had said to him all day on repeat as he'd tried to discern its origins.
It was the voice from his dream, the one of being shrouded in darkness with an unseen creature aft and three silver lights fore.
The brunette shook his head as he wrenched his thoughts away from that dream. This wasn't the time or place to begin analyzing it yet again. Instead, he followed Rias' direction, focusing on the concept of power, this time focusing on his shoulder blades.
His skin began to prick, and Issei felt as though the room had just cooled several degrees, but still he did not open his eyes.
The light behind his eyelids dimmed as his brow furrowed harder and harder, every possible thought relating to power pranced through his mind. All sensation died as he focused on those thoughts to the exclusion of all else.
He was only barely aware of the slight gasps that came from his fellow students.
As he continued to focus, the sensation began to concentrate behind his shoulder blades, just as the mysterious voice claimed.
Thirty seconds passed. Forty. Fifty.
After almost precisely a full minute, Issei felt another sensation from his back, and the gasps he'd ignored before came much louder now.
"...my God..." he heard Ryuji murmur.
Issei's eyes snapped open. "What, what is it?"
Kiba's hand raised, pointing behind Issei. He said nothing.
Turning to follow the blonde's finger, Issei's eyes looked over his shoulder. What he saw there nearly caused his heart to stop.
Flowing out from his back was a pair of wings – but they were not the wings from before. Those had vanished.
The wings that had replaced them were not the spindly things from before. These were huge, easily six feet long, and nearly as wide as his own torso was long. These wings were also somewhat bat-like, and along where the bones would have been in a bat's, there were numerous gems releasing a silver glow.
Issei gulped as he realized that they were identical to the glowing gems from his dream, and just what these appendages resembled.
"Rias... why do I have a pair of dragon's wings growing from my back?!"
And cut.
I will eventually explain what's become of Akeno in a later chapter.
