DXD: Catalyst of Legends

…..into the air, both quickly disappearing from sight.

When he could no longer hear the sound of wing-beats, he sighed in relief and dropped to his knees. His grip on his sword relaxed as he brought it back over his shoulder and allowed it to disperse like mist into the wind.

Not ten seconds later, the adrenaline surging through his veins was cut off, and he clenched his teeth and hissed. His now normal eyes stung, as they typically did when he employed their higher use.

No matter how often he practiced with them, there was always the awful stinging pain that flared from behind his eyes once he turned them off. Worse still, the aftereffects were proportionate in their use; the longer he held his Mystic Eyes active, the longer he was effectively blind afterward.

To his frustration, he didn't have the special equipment needed to learn the reason for that by himself, so he couldn't build a Mystic Code to counter the effects. It wasn't exactly something he could go to an optometrist about.

For the time being, his only working solution was to use them as sparingly as possible.

After a few minutes of fighting to see again, he looked to his wounds to assess the damage. The gash he had sustained on his upper arm was still bleeding, though it was luckily not very deep.

Shifting his weight to his right leg and twisting his arm so that the elbow faced forward, he lifted his right hand and drew runes across the wound with his index finger.

'Fehu. Mannaz.

Uruz. Tiwaz.

Nauthiz. '

His teeth clenched even tighter as the runic spell set to work, slowly stretching the lacerated skin and underlying blood vessels into their proper place, then sealing them shut in a light yellow hue. Comparatively speaking, the pain of the procedure was similar to getting stitches under a weak anesthesia.

When he first used the spell on himself years ago, it felt like someone was pulling the skin together with hot tweezers. The ugly scar on his shin was his reminder to never use himself as a medical experiment again.

By the end of it, a light purple scar no wider than a pencil lie contrasting against the surrounding healthy skin. Hopefully, no one he knew would notice the sudden appearance of a scar that wasn't there before.

Especially Aika.

With the danger over for the moment, he thought back to the fight and cringed at the egregious risks he'd just taken tonight. They were many in number, but the biggest was even getting into this situation in the first place! He knew better, he'd been taught better, than to charge headlong into a fight that he shouldn't be able to win, not knowing at all what to expect, and yet he acted on little more than impulse after adrenaline-fueled impulse.

Now he'd made himself a target to the damn Grigori! Like he didn't have enough problems to deal with!

"Fuckin' hell," he grumbled as he stood up and approached the spot where Issei had fallen. Only to find it empty of a body, a pool of blood being the only evidence that something was ever there.

Confused, he looked to the fountain, then back to the patch. Issei had dropped right there, he was sure of it.

There were no bloody streaks in the grass or on the sidewalk, so he hadn't been dragged away. At the same time, though, there were no random droplets around the pool from being carried away, nor were there any scorch marks to attest possible destruction of the body.

'The only way somebody could move a fresh corpse without leaving a trail would be to… teleport it away, and that's…'

His brow furrowed as he pulled out the parchment paper from his pocket. The pieces fell together in an instant.

While he was fighting Dohnaseek, some Devil or another had come along and reincarnated the half-dead brunette, likely to lay claim to whatever Sacred Gear it was that Raynare had mentioned earlier.

"Vultures," he spat. They had to have been watching the pervert for some time if they were so quick to act.

Logically speaking, he had no way of knowing who had done it, or where they had taken the body. Even if he did, though, it wouldn't matter; Issei was now somebody's property.

With a slow start, the exhausted magus began the trek back to his apartment, but not before picking up the spent flashbang rune as well as several black feathers that Dohnaseek had lost during their fight. He'd have to ramp up his security measures as soon as possible; new Bounded Field around the apartment, update his sensory runes to detect Fallen from a distance, maybe come up with a sequence that could react negatively to Fallen flesh…

But before any of that, he had to study his source material. Sadly, there was only so much one could with just feathers.

"It's going to be a long night," he sighed tiredly. "I might not even be functional enough for school tomorrow.

Shit. "

As he trudged home, he failed to notice a figure curiously watching him from atop a telephone pole down the street.

"Oh my~" they cooed before vanishing in a red magic circle.

*BEEP BEEP BEEP*

Connor was wrested from blissful slumber by his accursed phone alarm from across the room. With restrained fury and body aches everywhere, he forced himself out of bed to turn off the alarm and give his ears a moment of peace.

5:45 A. M…

Two hours of sleep was NOT ENOUGH!

Fighting off the temptation to throw his phone at the wall then throw himself back into bed, he gathered enough coherent thought to remember why he was so upset this early in the morning.

Last night had to be one of the worst in his entire life. He had happened upon a crime scene of supernatural origin, fought for his life against a Fallen Angel, killed said Fallen, and now had to contend with the looming threat the bluenette Fallen had delivered before leaving.

It was only after he got home that the shock of having actually killed someone and the stress of everything else came crashing down all at once, sending him….