After contemplating my new situation for some time, I finally decided to get dressed in the school uniform and slowly descended the stairs to eat breakfast with my mother and father.
I still feel like all of this is a beautiful dream that I am going to wake up from at any time, back to the nightmare that was reality.
"..Good morning"
"Good Morning Issei! Come on, eat your food quickly or you are going to be late!"
"Haha, It's Ok Miki, if he is late then I'll just drop him off"
I kept watching from the side as my parents devolved into inane bickering with a tight grip on my emotions. It would not do to ruin their morning with my problems.
I just kept a smile on my face as I ate food that could be called a luxury by anyone from my old world and left the house to head towards school. An Idea that I am still coming to terms with.
Sure, I knew about the concept thanks to the classes I took with Sasaki to understand the world before it was destroyed by the Aragami Apocalypse but I never imagined that I would get to experience such a thing firsthand.
I walked out of the house with a full stomach and expectations of peace in this seemingly peaceful world.
But all my hopes were shattered when I felt a sudden surge in energy somewhere nearby, forcing me to change my plans and run towards the source, only to see something that shocked me to my very core.
"How dare a mere human like you- AHHH!"
It was the same avian creature, a fallen, that had attacked my previous self yesterday. But unlike the confident and cruel creature that I saw in my memories, what I saw now was very different.
Her hair in a mess, her wings sawed off and her body was covered in bullet wounds. That was her current situation as I watched her being played around with by someone that I was very familiar with in my previous world.
While her long blond hair was something new, her piercing green eyes and her lithe and fragile-looking frame that hid terrifying strength were all too familiar to me. It was the same image I always had in my nightmares of that accursed day.
Her weapon, which was currently in the form of her most preferred blade type, The Bolt Katana, was pierced into the back of the Fallen as its creams of pain rang out in the clearing.
As the fallen continued to scream in pain and shout insults and threats toward the beautiful girl that was stepping on its back to keep it from escaping, I couldn't help but tremble in loss and excitement.
"You bitch, I will not let you off easy, just who do you think-AHHH!"
"Silence, Fallen, I did not give you permission to speak" her cold voice rang out as she simply moved her blade upwards, slowly and painfully, making sure that the Fallen felt all the pain and knew that its end was near.
It was only when the Fallen had been reduced to a blabbering mess with tears of pain and fear pouring out of her eyes and her begging for her life reached the limit, that the girl swiftly move her blade, severing its head and ending its life.
Suddenly, her God Arc started to shrink and shift around just like mine before it became small enough to hide in her plain white dress. It was only then did she turn towards me and her cold green eyes widened in recognition. She shifted into a stance that I was familiar with, ready to take off and tackle me in a hug as she always used to do, but a strange emotion passed through her eyes before she settled back into a normal stance and bowed towards me.
"I am sorry you had to see me in such a situation, it would be best for you to forget about what happened here-"
"Asia?" I called out, hoping that this girl was not just a counterpart of the woman that I once loved in this world.
And I was rewarded as her eyes once again lit up, this time, there were no other expressions passing through her eyes except happiness.
Suddenly, I was enveloped in a crushing hug as I felt her tears soak through my shirt, although, I couldn't say much about myself since I was too busy hugging her back with my own tears.
(Asia POV)
Seeing him after such a long time, and knowing that this was not just a counterpart of him in this world, I couldn't help but let loose in over five years that I had spent in this world.
Ever since I woke up in my counterpart's body in this world, I had been searching everywhere in the world using the influence that I had inherited from this body. While it was not easy to trick the Church into believing that I was till their 'Holy Maiden' it was a price I was willing to pay to look for my friends, and my love.
After all, they are the only family I ever had in that accursed world that we called home.
But all of my searches turned up empty with the only other person that matched the description and name of one of my teammates clearly leading an ordinary life.
Now, I had him in my arms just like I always used to back in the day, and I am never letting him go again.
I held him tightly as he continued to tremble In my arms, probably due to how long he had to live without me, without us, in that horrible world. I can only hope that he grew from that experience and became a better person.
"Shhh, it's ok Issei, I am not leaving you again" I whispered as his grip tightened on me.
"Y-You died! You died and left me behind. You and the others, you promised me that you would not do anything dangerous while I was gone, but you left me alone. You broke your promise"
It took everything I had not to break down right there, while his words were minimal, his trembling body and his tears were enough to make me understand just how much my death had affected him. This was the guy that didn't even flinch when an Ogre tail hit him in the face, causing him to lose his right eye. This was the guy that fought Aragami that caused even veterans to have weak knees. And yet, here he was, crying like a baby.
"I know, and I am sorry. I just thought that I could handle that mission, it was just to kill a few Ogre tails, but I never anticipated that a Dyaus Pita would appear out of nowhere and ambush me"
He slowly released his hung as he looked into my eyes the same way he always did to see if I was lying to him.
"…I killed it"
I tilted my head in confusion and what he meant.
"The Pita, which killed you. I hunted it down with the team and killed it in the most painful way possible"
I gave him an astonished look. Dyaus Pita is a Large Type of Aragami that is considered to be one of the most dangerous types in the Far East. It was so powerful that it took even an elite team like the Cardle, led by Utsugi Lenka to combine their efforts to bring it down, even then they had to use its own body part as a weapon because a regular God Arc was incapable of defeating it unless the God Arc is upgraded using the body parts of an Aragami that was on equal footing with it.
For Issei to have killed one, even with the help of a team, is nothing short of a miracle. Although, that could be a biased opinion from me given the fact that I was a God Eater for only two years before my demise. Who knows how many years Issei spent after that as a God Eater? Speaking of which.
"Issei, how did you get to this world?"
He put on a thoughtful face as he spoke. Is it just me or is he a lot more serious and competent than what I remember him to be?
"I don't know, one moment, I was out on a regular patrol at the borders to check out a strange type of an Aragami that the Cradle had discovered, next thing I know, I am here"
"Fenrir sent you out on a patrol, alone? What were they thinking? In fact, how did the team even allow you to go alone? I know for a fact that Cao would raise hell at the HQ for that attempt alone "
At this his face twisted as a weight settled in my gut.
"Yeah, he used to do that didn't he?"
"…Used to? Issei, don't tell me.."
"They are gone. Cao and Arthur are dead, they died two years after you did. We were ambushed by a Marduk. We never expected to encounter a Psion so we were left helpless as our God Arc's stopped working. It made short work of the others, I would have died too if it were not for one of the sudden appearance of God Eater from the Blood Unit."
But then, his face twisted into a mix between a grin and a sneer.
"But I learned from that mistake and I became stronger, I learned Blood Arts and learned how to manipulate the Oracle energy in my body, learning Burst arts as a result. After training for a few years, I tracked down that same Marduk and killed it in the same way that I killed the Pita, with extreme prejudice. In fact that mission was what earned me the rank of a Commander"
At this, I hugged him even tighter as tears continued to pour out of my eyes. Just how much did you suffer for us? Just how much blame did you put on yourself because of our deaths?
I did not know how much time was passed in us hugging each other for comfort as we sat down, neither did I care about the dead body nearby.
For that moment, the only thing I cared about was that the man that I fell for all those years ago was broken, and I needed to help him.
(POV Issei)
After that encounter, all thoughts about going to school were thrown out of the window as I took Asia straight home.
Although that brought along problems of its own if the way my parents fainted at my explanation that she was my girlfriend was anything to go by.
The rest of the day went by catching up with her and a lot of discrepancies were starting to come up.
She had spent five years in this world as a girl that lived in the Vatican as a so-called 'Holy Maiden'. She kept up the guise of being an innocent girl and used the resources of the church to search for our team, but since she was not able to find anyone but me, I assume that either they don't exist or they are hidden somewhere in the supernatural side of this world. When the opportunity to escape her circumstances arose with a Devil falling near her home out of nowhere, she used her sacred gear on him to heal his injuries to the bare minimum, also making herself as loud as possible to attract the attention of the church people.
After that, she was excommunicated, which was her goal from the beginning, and headed straight for Japan to see if I really was her captain or just his counterpart. Luckily for both of us, it was me that she found.
The real problems started when she started to explain what the sacred gears were and what their supposed function was.
Abilities or items bestowed on humanity by the Christian god to protect them from the darkness. And apparently, both of us were wielders of considerably rare sacred gears.
Asia held a healing type gear, called twilight healing, while I had the Boosted gear, a Longinus class gear.
What really brought our interest was how the sacred gears seem to be able to substitute our Bias factor requirements, preventing us from becoming Aragami ourselves. Asia's sacred gear was using its healing properties to combat the Oracle cell erosion while in my case Ddraig was using his draconic energy to contain and refine the erosion.
But whatever the case may be, I are just glad that we were able to find each other in this world.
