The Maniac of DxD (Highschool dxd insert/ semi-crack): Chapter 17

Akeno Himejima tried very hard to control her expressions and emotions as the tea continued to boil on the stove in front of her.

The half-fallen girl was currently in the home of someone that she thought she would never meet again, and it was enough to bring forth emotions that she thought she had long since buried.

And yet, unlike her father, she could not blame Ren for his absence in her life because he was not really obligated to look after her.

She felt a self-deprecating smile form on her face, something that was reflected off of the window near her. However, she did not want to ruin this moment with her thoughts and emotions, so she forcefully put on a fake smile that she had gotten used to holding since childhood.

It had always been like this with her, whether it was in the Himejima compound, during her travels, at the Gremory Estate, or even now, at the Kuoh Academy.

The only defense she had against the cruelty of the world, against those who would seek out any weakness she had, was her ability to bear all of it with a fake smile.

At the Himejima compound, she only had her mother and that bastard to truly care for her before Ren walked into her life. After that, the few months she spent on the road, she had no one so she had to stay strong.

The horrors and monsters she had seen during those days made her consider ending herself many, many times if only to escape that cold and cruel world.

After she ran into Rias coincidentally and was turned into her Queen, she thought that the worst was behind her. That she could finally be safe.

But once again, the world proved her wrong as she learned very early on that, in devil society, strength was everything.

If you are not strong, you don’t deserve to have even the most basic rights and would be reduced to a tool for others to use as they please.

That was why she put her everything into training, to become strong enough to protect herself and Rias should the need ever arise.

It was during those days, that she first learned of Ren’s channel on STube.

At first, she was very worried for him. She knew how vicious the Himejima clan could be when someone crosses them, and Ren had definitely crossed them multiple times even when they were still in the clan back in her childhood.

But soon, that worry was replaced with the joy of knowing that one of the most important people in her life was living his life to the fullest, just like he always wanted.

Then, as days went by and her various attempts to contact him were blocked in various ways, she learned another truth.

Shaking her head to get rid of those thoughts, Akeno picked up the pot and poured the tea into the cups before walking into the room where Ren was sitting, working on his laptop.

“Here you are, Ren.”

“…Thanks, Akeno.”

She gave that fake smile which Ren avoided looking at and pretended to continue working on whatever it was he was doing.

A part of her felt gleeful, knowing that she was the source of his current awkwardness and guilt because this meant that she at least had a place in his heart, buried far beneath his apparent insanity.

But another part of her felt just as guilty for making him feel that way when she did not deserve to receive such attention from Ren.

Akeno was not a stupid girl, even as a child.

Even back then, she knew that between the two of them, Ren was the only one who truly did most of the work for the both of them when they were supposed to be equal in their friendship.

When she asked him that question, on why he was pushing himself so far for her when she had nothing to offer him, his response was something that was etched into Akeno’s mind forever.

‘Do I need a reason to look after a friend? Besides, in friendship, there is no such thing as give and take. True friends don’t keep a record of favors or anything between them.’

For her child self, those words had an impact that Ren would never know because nobody had truly ever seen her as anything more than an abomination in that accursed clan.

That was why, her child-self had thrown everything she had into learning magical arts, specifically, the healing arts so that she could look after Ren who loved to do extreme training even back then.

To Akeno back then, Ren and her parents were everything to her. To her, they were her whole world.

Then, that fateful night, her world was destroyed completely and everything was taken from her.

Suddenly, Akeno came back to reality as she felt a familiar hand patting her head.

The callouses she felt were new, the size was wrong, and the heat she felt from the hand was much higher than it should be for a human.

And yet, there was a familiarity to the gesture that instinctively made her lean into it for comfort as tears from her eyes.

“Silly girl, you are still the same crybaby as back then, aren’t you? What have I told you about showing weakness in front of others?”

That familiar gesture, those familiar words, the familiar warmth in his voice, and that hidden concern for her in his words, finally made the walls she made around her heart over the past years collapse as she threw herself into his embrace, wailing like a child.

And just like she remembered from her childhood, he simply held her and comforted her.

For a split second, her imagination gave her the worst-case scenario.

That this was all a dream, a nightmare that she always had whenever she indulged herself in her memories.

That all of this would suddenly be replaced by her personal hell where she saw the dead bodies of her mother, father, and Ren, as the Himejima clan members surrounded her, ready to perform unspeakable horrors on her for the simple sin of being born.

However, even as the seconds ticked by and they turned to minutes, nothing like that happened, finally assuring her that this was no dream, which only made her sob even harder and clutch tightly onto the only family she had.

The young, powerless, and insane boy who protected her from her bullies in the Himejima clan. The boy who looked after her despite calling her silly and an idiot. The boy who was taken in by her parents when he was removed as the heir to his clan.

The boy who she saw as an older brother despite both of them being the same age and the one who saved her by giving her the courage to escape that hellish place after her mother died.

The two teenagers sat like that for a long time. Akeno Himejima, the Thunder Princess of the Gremory Peerage, one of the famous beauties of Kuoh Academy despite being a first-year student, the girl whose heart was jaded and was hidden behind walls of ice, continued wailing while clutching her surrogate brother.

All the while, Izayoi Ren, also known as Maniac Ren, continued comforting the teenager that he still saw as the silly girl who needed his help with the simplest of things despite being absolutely brilliant in most of the other things.

The only person in this world that he saw as family.