Story:

And at the very last second—the very last—the door at the back of the classroom slid open, and a boy strolled through it as if this were his own home's backyard.

Funky black hair, deliberately untidy. Red eyes, lazy and sharp at once. Collar loosened like a personal insult to the uniform code.

He came in half a beat after the bell with not one atom of hurry about him, the way the world itself seemed to reorganize politely around his entrance.

Peach's heart skipped. Not a beat—a full stair.

Because she finally met him again. Bill Ebonhart.

The boy who sat two rows away with his chair tilted back. Her classmate. Her first love, from another lifetime ago in this very classroom—the boy whose face she had carried in her heart across two worlds.

And the man who carried that same face in the other world: her tormentor, the demon lord of the Ninth Hell, Bel Vesperia—burned to ash by her own hands, reborn, and marching on Yamato with a hundred thousand even now.

Same face. Two lives. One sitting four meters from her homeroom seat.

Bill noticed her staring—of course he noticed; she was staring like a shrine guardian who had seen a ghost walk in through a school door—and instead of being unsettled by it, he caught her eye, held it, and gave her a slow, naughty wink, the corner of his mouth curling.

Then he dropped into his seat, tilted it back, and looked away toward the window as if nothing at all had happened.

Peach sat frozen, blood pounding in her ears, one hand tight around her wrist where the beads slept.

He's here. The face is HERE. Which means the heart, the Vesperia Heart—