Pride X Familiar - ReVamp, By Albert Ruckholdt, Free
Caelum Desanto, Caprice Steiner, Simone Alucard, and the Student Council of Galatea Academy are back in this the previously unreleased original version of the story of one high-school boy attending a school dominated by Aventis students, while steadily coming to terms with his abilities as a Familiar, and the power contained in the Fragment gifted to him by his Aventis Guardian, Arisa Imreh Lanfear.
In the wake of the Cataclysm which ended the lives of billions and brought about the demise of the First Galactic Age, human civilization fell into two camps. The Aventis, humans that are host to the Symbiote which makes them physically superior to the Regulars, who are humans incompatible or rejected by the Symbiote. Ruled by the eight Aventis clans known as Prides, humanity has settled into an age of quiet, gentle prosperity that veils an undercurrent of tension and discontent between the two races.
Living aboard the immense asteroid colony of Pharos, Regular high-school student, Caelum Desanto thought he was happy being incompatible with the Symbiote. Rejected by the organism for three years running, he is shocked to learn that Haruka Amiella, his gorgeous childhood friend, classmate, and unrequited crush of many years, is so compatible she’s joining the vaunted Avenir Pride. Instead of confessing his feelings to her, he falls victim to his resentment and turns a lunchtime, school rooftop encounter with Haruka into a catastrophe.
If he thought life couldn’t get any worse or any stranger, he was dead wrong. Suddenly stabbed in the chest by a knife-wielding girl dressed in the tatters of a school uniform, Caelum is promptly resurrected as a Familiar, neither Regular nor Aventis, when she injects him with the blood of Arisa Imreh Lanfear, a not-so-highly ranked member of the Lanfear Pride who over-estimates her nonetheless formidable position within the Pride.
Gifted by Arisa with one of the enigmatic relics known as Fragments, devices of unknown origin and great power that only Familiars can wield, Caelum serves out the remaining high-school year at his old school, before Arisa enrolls him into Galatea Academy, a prestigious establishment catering almost exclusively to Aventis students. With the knife-wielding girl for a classmate, and his reunion with Haruka ending up less than stellar, Caelum’s antics draw the ire of the female student body who quickly label him Public Enemy Number One.
To make matters worse, he is pulled into the machinations of the Student Council who are aware he possesses a Fragment, and have chosen to enter into a shadow conflict fought out in microcosm between those that serve the Prides, and those seeking to topple them from power. While suffering at the hands of irate female students, Caelum falls into the clutches of the wanton Student Council Vice-President, who has chosen to make him her latest conquest while thinly veiling her ulterior motives.
But when the discord between the ruling Aventis and those that oppose them rears its ugly head, putting the lives of his friends in danger, Caelum is forced to shelve his resentment for the Aventis and draw upon the power of his Fragment to protect the Academy and its students from the people responsible for the deaths of hundreds, including his parents, and the disappearance of his older sister.
