- Location
- france
- Pronouns
- He
Yeah, it's back!
Yeah, that's the problem with Kaiju. Collateral damage.
Behold, A Man (Highschool DxD Au/Celestial Menagerie, Self Insert)
- Thread starter Bowlerhat Guy
- Start date
- Location
- New Zealand
One the one hand, yay it's back.
This is still probably my favourite menagerie story, and definitely one of the best DxD stories I've read, so very happy it was updated.
...On the other hand, how does "making a monster resemble you without losing any of it's powers" mix with "being a 130 feet ant able to creature offspring monsters".
Is it a 130 foot version of Cole?
Or is it a 130ffot kaiju compressed down to a 6-ish foot human, but retaining it's strength?
Because if so.... well then.
Edit: Bugger, only up to 20% larger than the summoner.
This is still probably my favourite menagerie story, and definitely one of the best DxD stories I've read, so very happy it was updated.
...On the other hand, how does "making a monster resemble you without losing any of it's powers" mix with "being a 130 feet ant able to creature offspring monsters".
Is it a 130 foot version of Cole?
Or is it a 130ffot kaiju compressed down to a 6-ish foot human, but retaining it's strength?
Because if so.... well then.
Edit: Bugger, only up to 20% larger than the summoner.
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Aeoniam
Tauren Historian
- Location
- Thunderbluff, Mulgore
I really like the contrast in this fic. The grounded, human really, way of viewing the world from this character against the silliness that gets quite serious when you think about it from DxD is great. A lot of others try to do the same, but it rarely really feels natural.
That the celestial bullshit is hard to hide is great too, gives human failure space to get going while looking less like a power trip.
If I had a choose a thing to nitpick though, I think that the whole Celestial Menagerie not being an actual Sacred Gear (to my knowledge) is a bit annoying. OoC powers are always something I see people trip around in fanfics, to the point I usually dislike it on principle. It's going alright for now, but still! Are there any concrete plans for dealing with the power itself, even if it's the mighty handwavium of nobody cares, or will it be a plotpoint?
That the celestial bullshit is hard to hide is great too, gives human failure space to get going while looking less like a power trip.
If I had a choose a thing to nitpick though, I think that the whole Celestial Menagerie not being an actual Sacred Gear (to my knowledge) is a bit annoying. OoC powers are always something I see people trip around in fanfics, to the point I usually dislike it on principle. It's going alright for now, but still! Are there any concrete plans for dealing with the power itself, even if it's the mighty handwavium of nobody cares, or will it be a plotpoint?
Yup, Rias would do that. The weirdo.
- Pronouns
- He
I am taking the tact that the main character does not know what the fuck it is any more than anyone else does, and just assumes it is, and treats it as, a sacred gear eventually. I'm not terribly fond of Celestial X characters getting pulled aside by [Random Omnipotent Force] to have things spelled out for them, complete with power name.
So just treat it like a really jazzed up Sacred Gear
RottenSuccphagus
ⴉⴀⴞⴀⴁⴄⴐⴈ
- Location
- Georgia
its basically an Annihilation Maker but much more limited, so it wouldn't really be jazzed up unless you mean cosmetically, then yes it is quite jazzy.
its whole aesthetic gives quite the buzz.
Mgunh1
Not an AI, honest!
- Location
- Northern Luna Base, Module 5, Sublevel 15
Different, not limited. Just because his version is a tad buggy right now...its basically an Annihilation Maker but much more limited, so it wouldn't really be jazzed up unless you mean cosmetically, then yes it is quite jazzy.
its whole aesthetic gives quite the buzz.
- Location
- Chile
I don't think this works if he's typing in japanese, since each letter would be a silabe.
Man am glad to see this back. Thanks for the chapter.
Ah.i get it.
Cultureshock with adrenaline and clinging to the familiar. I was wondering why the mc mostly behaves like a complete tool.
I hope he gets some weeks to cool of and stop demanding the world to work in a way he is comfortable with.Never works.
Its jarring reading his inner monologue that sounds somewhat competent,and when he opens his mouth he sounds like a hysterical angsty teenager.
A flawed mc is more realistic,and character development will be satisfying. I just hope he learns to think about more than the immediate situation soon.
Edit: long rant,sorry, you are a good writer,i just dont get your choices in this case.
its really jarring when the mc constantly lists of inconsistencys. Are you just bashing dxd?either invent an explanation or dont put a lampshade on everything. This way its just bashing,which opens the question,if you dont like dxd,why put your mc there?
Just listening to a guy complain 24/7 is not fun. If you want to explain the deeper reasons like with the politics or the kiba smile bit? Great!
its always nice to add stuff to explain stuff.
But just putting someone into a setting and complaining about inconsistencys Feels like putting someone in star wars and having them insist the force is unrealistic.
This is a new reality. YOU are the part thats unrealistic.
Cultureshock with adrenaline and clinging to the familiar. I was wondering why the mc mostly behaves like a complete tool.
I hope he gets some weeks to cool of and stop demanding the world to work in a way he is comfortable with.Never works.
Its jarring reading his inner monologue that sounds somewhat competent,and when he opens his mouth he sounds like a hysterical angsty teenager.
A flawed mc is more realistic,and character development will be satisfying. I just hope he learns to think about more than the immediate situation soon.
Edit: long rant,sorry, you are a good writer,i just dont get your choices in this case.
its really jarring when the mc constantly lists of inconsistencys. Are you just bashing dxd?either invent an explanation or dont put a lampshade on everything. This way its just bashing,which opens the question,if you dont like dxd,why put your mc there?
Just listening to a guy complain 24/7 is not fun. If you want to explain the deeper reasons like with the politics or the kiba smile bit? Great!
its always nice to add stuff to explain stuff.
But just putting someone into a setting and complaining about inconsistencys Feels like putting someone in star wars and having them insist the force is unrealistic.
This is a new reality. YOU are the part thats unrealistic.
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Hope he trains his hunter perk and learns some magic
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Personally I found this a completely realistic (to the real world) reaction to having been involved in a battle against a necromancer raising enough zombies to cover an entire town. It was plainly spelled out that they would have killed a load of people if not stopped and the ending basically stated that no one is going to get involved in what could blow up into an international incident.
Seriously, the necromancer dumped a horde of mindless killers into a civilian location just to get attention. I am fairly certain that should count as either terrorism or a violation of international humanitarian law. Yet in DxD the majority of supernatural factions simply don't care what happens to random humans, so it apparently gets labeled a moderate infraction and largely ignored. I, at least, would be horrified to know that this kind of thing can happen and the perpetrator can escape to try it again so long as they're powerful enough or have the right abilities.
Ultimately, the conflict between the devils and Jona comes from a difference of perspective. The Peerage are not only natives of a world that runs on Shonen 'logic' but are also seemingly jaded to this kind of thing. Frankly I found the way they reacted to Jona's breakdown somewhat patronizing. I realize Kiba was trying to "knock some sense" into Jona but given the number of their friend-group who have been in that situation it felt a little lacking in empathy. Though admittedly, none of the Peerage are therapists or know how to deal with panicking individuals all that well, being teenagers themselves. Most likely Akeno or someone else will sit down next to Jona later and "reveal" their backstory in an attempt to help a la shonen tropes.
In short, all the characters acted in a manner that makes sense given their backgrounds and experiences and that very fact resulted in a conflict of priorities among them. It seems to me Jona will have to learn to get genre-savvy quickly if he is to make it in this world because the setting of DxD is honestly messed up and only really work thanks to the aforementioned shonen logic. That is my take on the situation anyway.
Glad to see this updated by the way.
Seriously, the necromancer dumped a horde of mindless killers into a civilian location just to get attention. I am fairly certain that should count as either terrorism or a violation of international humanitarian law. Yet in DxD the majority of supernatural factions simply don't care what happens to random humans, so it apparently gets labeled a moderate infraction and largely ignored. I, at least, would be horrified to know that this kind of thing can happen and the perpetrator can escape to try it again so long as they're powerful enough or have the right abilities.
Ultimately, the conflict between the devils and Jona comes from a difference of perspective. The Peerage are not only natives of a world that runs on Shonen 'logic' but are also seemingly jaded to this kind of thing. Frankly I found the way they reacted to Jona's breakdown somewhat patronizing. I realize Kiba was trying to "knock some sense" into Jona but given the number of their friend-group who have been in that situation it felt a little lacking in empathy. Though admittedly, none of the Peerage are therapists or know how to deal with panicking individuals all that well, being teenagers themselves. Most likely Akeno or someone else will sit down next to Jona later and "reveal" their backstory in an attempt to help a la shonen tropes.
In short, all the characters acted in a manner that makes sense given their backgrounds and experiences and that very fact resulted in a conflict of priorities among them. It seems to me Jona will have to learn to get genre-savvy quickly if he is to make it in this world because the setting of DxD is honestly messed up and only really work thanks to the aforementioned shonen logic. That is my take on the situation anyway.
Glad to see this updated by the way.
Lopezelpesado
Space worm best worm.
- Pronouns
- Something
Cool new chapter! Tho I gotta ask, do you o ly have monsters in your list for pulls? Or have you really just pulled monsters? Like it feels very unlikely how many of them have been pulled.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
IIRC he's using the standard list, and has just gotten really peculiar luck with it.
i like how he just got an actual, straight up, monsterverse kaiju. the snarehunter ant is straight out of a king kong game apparently and, if I understand it right, live in the hollow earth
- Pronouns
- He
I just use the roller page on the document and choose between the power/skill or the monster if I can afford both.
I usually can't afford both, so it defaults to the one i can afford, and there are statistically way more monsters than powers, so more often than not the monster is the one I can afford.
The absurd frequency I find myself rolling '600 points, pick any 600 point creature' and not being able to choose it is just painful, if I'm being honest
Decided to do it for you. I gathered all of the image links you had throughout your story put them down below. You can just copy and paste the whole thing from here to your informational and then I'll delete this post after. After that it should be easier for you to update the informational whenever Cole gets a new creature in the future.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
...Would be nice to have larger images for some of these, not gonna lie. During my reread I wound up googling for some of them anyways to get a better look, but I didn't realize I could be saving them to help BHG out, lol.
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Big fan of this. Not only is it an interesting inversion of as large number of DXD fics, but it is also a version of the various "Celestial" stories that doesn't immediately put the user of said titular ability into an untouchable state of power. The fact that this story is also being written by one of the best authors on the site is just icing on the cake.
Shadow Archon
Protoss Preserver
- Location
- Louisiana
Huh. Gender-swapping the setting really does make it considerably less horny, doesn't it? I never really could get into Highschool DxD because of that. So, this is very interesting to me with that element dialed all the way down.
Jonathan is just one bad guy threatening his family away from pulling a Mark Grayson vs Angstrom on them, isn't he? And if he rolls a Klyntar Symbiote, he'll even be physically strong enough to do it.
When he decided to go full swarm with his summons, it made me want to put on some Zerg music, which made me interested in checking what future summons he could pull... and it kind of sucks that the Menagerie only has three Zerg options. Seriously? I mean, you get the entire Risk of Rain mob catalogue, but not the entire Zerg Swarm? Boo.
Sure, Tyranids are a more prevalent option here, and sure, you could argue there's some overlap if you had them both, but still!
Jonathan is just one bad guy threatening his family away from pulling a Mark Grayson vs Angstrom on them, isn't he? And if he rolls a Klyntar Symbiote, he'll even be physically strong enough to do it.
When he decided to go full swarm with his summons, it made me want to put on some Zerg music, which made me interested in checking what future summons he could pull... and it kind of sucks that the Menagerie only has three Zerg options. Seriously? I mean, you get the entire Risk of Rain mob catalogue, but not the entire Zerg Swarm? Boo.
Sure, Tyranids are a more prevalent option here, and sure, you could argue there's some overlap if you had them both, but still!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Shadow Archon
Protoss Preserver
- Location
- Louisiana
Well, it is incredibly less so without Issei being around as the protagonist, but if his gender-swapped version, who we probably already saw, manages to become a main character?
Yeah.
Cage 1.4
- Pronouns
- He
I wanted to stick around and clear up any remaining zombies that might have gotten left behind by fuckhead the magnificent after my little break down, but the devil group were pretty insistent that I go home and get some sleep. They seemed pretty insistent that I would need it more than them— some bullshit about devils being nocturnal despite that meaning literally nothing when you had to be awake at like six am to go to school all day— and I had to admit that I was pretty exhausted. Not because I had exerted myself all that much during the fighting. Quite the opposite, honestly.
But once all the tension I was feeling had simmered down to what I could maybe describe as a more 'normal' background amount of dread, a lot of the adrenaline that had been keeping me moving faded, leaving me feeling kind of strung out.
It wouldn't have been the first fourty eight hour stint of uninterrupted consciousness I'd dealt with, and in fact, I was now young again which meant I was even better suited to it than I used to be, but well….
Despite my assurances that I was fine (I'm always fine, eventually), Sirzechs insisted.
So naturally I spent the majority of the rest of the night staring with bloodshot eyes at the ceiling of my unfamiliar bedroom, not bothering to shower, or change out of my clothes, or do much of anything once I snuck back into my house.
It didn't matter that I was pretty sure all the zombies should have died when fuckass stopped casting his spell or whatever. It didn't matter that the Gremory group were probably out there combing the city to make sure there were no stragglers.
I felt like I'd left the stove on and gone to work, and it sucked.
I was so keyed up that I even kept Reaper summoned, sitting on the roof of my house, with orders to make sure nothing attacked us while I 'rested'. A handful of hours later, I learned that the little guy could literally fold himself into the shape of a very ominous looking treasure chest, when he got bored and crawled through my open window into my room. The fact that he could seamlessly crawl through the seemingly much smaller aperture would probably have been nightmare inducing for anyone else, but for me it was a small comfort I didn't know I needed.
Mind you. The room was still too fucking small for him, and he effectively took up every free inch of floor space I had when he was doing it, but, somehow, I just couldn't manage to fall asleep until I was halfway off my bed, with my left arm draped precariously over the top of the faux 'chest' Reaper had become, with one leg dangling on the floor.
That happened… maybe an hour before it was time for me to wake up for the day. So. As you might imagine, when my Mom slammed the door to my room open and started haranguing me awake, pausing only to harangue me about where I'd gotten the clearly expensive looking piece of 'furniture', I was… not in a good mood.
"You should shower," My Papa said as I plopped down on the couch next to him with a piece of toast in hand. My mom didn't make breakfast every morning. Fairly often, sure, but with exception for my youngest brother, who was now roughly six years old, the rest of us were more than capable of buttering toast.
"…probably," I conceded, making no move to get up and do so, and instead, crunching into my toast.
"Get a plate," My papa snapped off instantly, before I could take a second bite.
I say snapped not as in 'got mad', so much as the speed and seriousness of his statement brought to mind an abrupt snapping motion. I was briefly caught off guard by the order, because I, again, was not accustomed to having an adult with power over me anymore, and had long since dubbed the inconvenience of creating more dishes I would have to was later greater than of having to sweep up some crumbs at some nebulous later date.
I also had a fucking headache, of the kind reserved solely for the sleepless, and felt like there were midgets inside my skull pounding on the back of my eyeballs for funsies.
"It's fine," I snapped right back, the exact same way I would if one of my little brothers was giving me shit.
My papa and I stared at each other for ten consecutive seconds at that, until he grunted irately at me and got up on his own, swiftly returning with a saucer for me to eat over.
I, not being a completely ungrateful dickhead, accepted the plate wordlessly, and we both continued on as though nothing had happened.
"I'll drive you to school. Take a shower." My papa repeated himself.
I grimaced.
"It's just one day-" I argued - definitely not whined - at him.
Look I was tired. Sue me. If I could get away with staying in bed and not going to school at all, I'd have done so.
Unfortunately, my argument to that effect got cut off in the middle of my sentence by my power withdrawing from the primordial soup with two distinct objects in tow for me to choose from.
One was a fucking fungus.
Like, just straight up, a semi-sentient fungus. 'SCP-2379'. I didn't know all that much about it, and wouldn't unless I chose to absorb it into my menagerie, but the cliff notes information I got from a glance at it told me it was one of those exponential world ending threats that the SCP setting loved so god damn much. This, I instantly opted to discard, and so my power automatically reeled in the other option, which was a modifier called… 'Contingent Summoning'.
"-you're going to smell at school. If you don't feel like you can make it through the whole day, go to the office and call me, so I can pick you up at lunch, but at least try to…" My papa was dictating to me before registering my mini-stroke and grunting in irritation.
Whether that was because of the supernatural bullshit he couldn't control or do anything about rearing its head, or because he was irked that I probably hadn't heard half of what he said, I wasn't quite sure.
"Wuh?" I blurted at him, the combination of my exhaustion and the disorientation of having to parse through my gnosis before being dumped back in my oh so limited reality leaving me briefly at a loss for words.
Papa looked at me consideringly for a second, before grunting and turning back to the television. "Shower. Now." He ordered. He punctuated the demand with a look that I hadn't seen a very long time. The kind of silent glare that always popped up on him right before he genuinely lost his temper, usually when he thought someone or something was being illogical and stupid in a way that profoundly inconvenienced him.
Now look, as a normal adult, with a reasonable logical understanding of the world, I perfectly well understood that parents, under most circumstances, were well within their rights to expect a certain minimum amount of obedience from their children, particularly in the arenas of hygiene and cleanliness. That's… kind of just how you teach kids stuff. They certainly aren't going to develop good habits on their own.
Simultaneously with that thought though.
Wow, I really fucking hated being told what to do.
Still, recognizing that I was being, from an adults point of view, a fucking brat, I took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then exhaled sharply.
Then I stood, finished off my breakfast, and dragged my still conscious corpse to the bathroom to shower.
Fun fact about the house that threw me off, and probably contributed significantly to how uncomfortable I found using the bath here - it was on the main floor. I don't know if that's really all that abnormal by western standards, but from my point of view, every home I had ever lived in had the bath on the second floor. Well away from anyone who might be casually meandering around the house.
Don't ask me why being able to hear my family moving around outside the bathroom bothered me so much, because I couldn't put it into words if I tried. It was just… different than I was used to. Hell, the layout of the bathroom itself was different than I was uses to. I guess when papa said the money here was good he wasn't kidding, because the bathroom was… well for one it wasn't a bathroom.
When I think of a bathroom, I think of a room that has a toilet and a tub in it.
This was not that. There was, in fact, a separate, closet sized room not to far away that contained the toilet. This room contained a convoluted and wonky extended tile setup. It was way to big for my sensibilities, especially compared to how compact literally everything else in the house was. There was a wide open space with faucets sticking out of the walls and two separate shower heads above them, and then past that there was a raised, knee high wall, that could be filled with water like a bath tub even though it looked like a really tiny fucking pool.
It was all. Fucking. Weird.
And I mean, yeah, yeah, culture shock and all that, but unlike the version of me who would have theoretically been prepared enough for moving to this country to learn some of the language, this had basically all just jumped out of the nearest sewer and cold cocked me. The only reason I wasn't all that concerned by the morally dubious fact that I had stolen someones body was that I had body-jacked myself.
And no one hates that guy more than me.
Whatever. I shook off the steadily more dour thoughts that were consuming me, a not uncommon tendency when I am exhausted, and got down to showering. About half way through washing my hair a thought occurred to me, and I couldn't help but test something that had dawned on me with the acquisition of my most recent ability.
Contingent Summoning did what it said on the tin. I could tag a creature with a specific summoning condition, and when that condition was met, the creature would be summoned forth using my power automatically and on its own. There were obvious use cases for this. Things like 'if I am about to be injured' or 'someone tries to attack me from behind' were low hanging fruit. Useful 'traps' to setup ahead of time as, well, contingencies to make up for my obviously lacking reaction time compared to the more speedy supernaturals that I knew probably existed in this world. I'd already noted that Kiba was basically a speedster from my point of view, so if she really wanted to kill me, there probably wasn't much I could actually do about it.
Until now.
Now I could grab my Tyrant Guard, tag it with 'if I would otherwise be in danger of lethal injury, summon between me and the threat' and it would theoretically happen exactly like that to shield me before the hit could land.
All without my actual input.
There were a couple of downsides, like the fact that I was locked out of summoning that particular member of my swarm while it was abiding by those conditions. But even still.
Did I -
I paused to ride out the momentary stumble caused by my power reaching out and grabbing nothing before returning to my original train of thought.
Did I actually need to be personally aware of the information being used to trigger a contingent summon? It'd be pretty useless if it couldn't respond to an ambush unless I was already aware of the ambush, so that shouldn't be the case, but…
Closing my eyes while the hot water flowed down over me, I mentally navigated to the cage containing the totally normal tree frog I hadn't yet seen a real use for, and directed a 'condition' at it, impressing upon its cage the need to open itself when a car not belonging to my family went past on the street outside of the house.
If this worked the way I thought it did…
I continued my somewhat slow paced shower - have I mentioned that I didn't really care about going to school today? - for another few minutes, before there was abruptly a very annoyed tree frog doing its best to hop away form the steaming hot water around me.
I stared after the creature blankly for several seconds, before feeling a wide, malicious grin spread across my face.
I could work with this.
It was somewhat convoluted, and every time I did it I effectively had to give up access to one of my monsters for twenty four hours, but this was pretty much the perfect way to use my more 'useless' minions. I used to be an avid reader of a story called Worm, where people who had the ability to pull information from the ether were called Thinkers. That setting had a whole bunch of weird limitations and blocks on what information you could derive that way, but as far as I was aware this one had no such information control techniques. I mean, it probably did have some kind of anti-scry effect somewhere, but I doubted even that would work on this new ability of mine. I didn't get the impression my ability was actually 'looking' for information to make contingent summoning work.
It was more like… if something was true, the effect simply happened. It was like a kind of weird, quantum entanglement effect.
Absent mindedly, I unsummoned the frog rather than leave it to suffer in an environment it clearly wasn't comfortable or happy in, while pondering what I could do with this. I felt energized all of a sudden. With this I could- I could-
Go to fucking school, I guess. Ugh.
Just like that, all will to live once more left my body, and I somehow felt even more tired than I had previously despite nothing really changing for me in that brief span of time.
"Jona! Hurry up-" My papa yelled at me from the outside the bathroom, drawing a flinch from me. Ugh. Being a teenager was so stupid. My parents really wanted me to go to school. If I was living in your typical isekai scenario with no one to rely on but myself I'd probably just drop out. Unfortunately, I wasn't, and so I had to do the right thing or whatever and actually attend. At least, that's what I thought he was rushing me for. Until he kept talking.
"-one of your friends came to pick you up!"
…one of my what the fuck now?
"What?!" I yelled back at him in honest confusion, rushing through the last of my ablutions and hurrying over to grab my clothes off the floor.
They stunk, and needed washing, but they were also the only uniform I had, and not wearing them literally wasn't an option, so everyone else would just have to deal with it.
Well. That, or the cloying scent of way too much axe body spray.
Ugh. I hate being a teenager again.
I hurriedly crammed myself into my underwear and pants, before deciding to just cram the rest of my clothes under one arm so I could shove the bathroom door open and rush into the hallway outside. The bathroom was at the end of a hallway that ran parallel to the stairs to the second floor, and the… I dunno what to call it, but, the 'toilet' room was to the right of that hallway, effectively opposite the stairs. You could actually see straight from one end of the house to the other, directly to the front door, from the bathroom, which was something I learned at that exact moment, because I ended up dripping wet, not wearing a shirt, staring wide eyed at Kiba as my Mom chatted with her just inside the said front door.
We made eye contact over my Mom's shoulder, and I could see my papa watching the interaction in my peripheral vision, leaning over the back of the couch so just the top half of his face with even my field of view.
Kiba smiled beatifically at me.
I felt my eye twitch at her nonchalance, and, more importantly than that, invasion of my home, such as it were.
Thankfully, I was not in fact, a blushing anime girl, so instead of freaking out I just grunted in annoyance, and threw my shirt over my head, fighting it down over the rest of me in a rumpled and disheveled looking way as I made my way into the living room.
"Yo?" I half asked, then flinched when my power dumped another summoning modifier on me called 'Magic Boost' that just… effectively doubled the benefits, duration, damage, etc, etc of any one of my summons abilities that you could consider 'magic' in nature.
It was neat but not game changing, so I filed it away for later consideration.
"Good morning, Cole-san!" She said with a demure kind of cheer that wigged me out. Mostly because I couldn't tell how sincere it was. Kiba's stepford smiler thing would probably not even be recognizeable to me if I didn't have some degree of foreknowledge about her character, but with it, I could barely parse how much of any given one of her actions was just a mask. Since I was paranoid and not very good at being social in the first place, this led to me almost always erring on the side of caution, and assuming it was all fake, which wasn't a particularly comfortable feeling to have around someone you knew could kill you with relative ease.
"Heeeeey, Kiba… uh… whaaaat are you doing here?" I asked slowly, darting a glance to my papa, who I could tell had already figured out by now that this had to be one of those people I was talking about yesterday of a magical persuasion.
How did I know this?
Mostly because he was staring at the lithe blond girl with enough intensity that I could see my Mom becoming visibly angry over it.
I took the opportunity while waiting for Kiba to respond to my question to visibly step between my parents, distracting my mom with the prospect of being nosey about my social life.
"Jona! You didn't tell me you'd made any… friends," She instantly crooned at me, making me flinch at her particular tone of voice. My mom was one of those people that fundamentally didn't believe friendship could exist between men and women. To her, any attempt to do so was just a pretext to be something more.
"I mean, we only just met, and, uh," I blabbered, way too tired to find conjure a better deflection than that while trying to maintain eye contact with Kiba, who lifted a hand to giggle daintily behind it.
"Mah, Cole-san and I are in the same class. I'm one of the only other english speakers, so it seemed natural that we would get along," She demurred.
"Oh, have you been in the country long? We just moved here and I still have a hard time when I'm at the grocery store—" My Mom rattled off heartily, easily allowing herself to be sidetracked into a somewhat lengthy diatribe about how the other neighbourhood moms seemed have their own little gossip group that she wanted in on.
I mean. That's not exactly how she said it, but that's what she meant, for sure.
Kiba for her part, just kind of smiled at the both of us, while my mom ranted, or, gossiped, or… whatever it is older women do when they're bored, social, and looking to make conversation.
I had to assume there was some method to the madness, because my Mom had always been infinitely more capable of forging connections with people than I had - a character flaw she liked to bring up every now and then when she felt the need to guilt me into doing something.
"Mom," I eventually interjected awkwardly when it became self evident that she was more than happy to absent mindedly stand in the entryway and chat.
My mom turned a somewhat questioning look on me for a second before seeming to remember what time it was.
"Oh, shit, sorry! Alan! Alan can you drive them both?" She pivoted immediately, turning a questioning look on my papa and doing her best to say the 'shit' part of that sentence under her breath.
The great irony of my mom was that she hated it when we swore, but I learned basically all my curse words from her in the first place. Not that she was verbally abusive or anything. I don't think she'd ever swore at me in her life. However, she did have a penchant for cussing just about everything else that inconvenienced or bothered her, which I found positively hilarious given how bad she was at hiding that fact.
…fuck, I was gonna have to tell my mom about all of this magic bullshit wasn't I? It wasn't fair to just tell papa, no matter how much better I felt he was going to take it than she would.
I always hated reading stories where characters arbitrarily kept secrets like that from one another.
Which is god damn ironic, because I was more than willing to append the thought with 'later' and summarily shuffle it to the back of my head as my papa unceremoniously grunted an agreement at her and circle the couch to start putting his shoes on.
"Why, uh, why don't we wait outside while he finds his keys and stuff?" I offered uncomfortably, not quite physically shoving Kiba back through the front door - but only because I had to walk around her to open it first.
"They seem very nice," She offered by way of the most bland platitudes possible.
"…Why… look I don't want to get angry here or anything but…" I trailed off, trying to thread a line between 'why the fuck are you here' and basic politeness. Truthfully, Kiba being here didn't bother me that much, it was just unexpected. And I hated unexpected bullshit. Still, as I've said before and will probably say again, I've read a book or two, and snapping at her in this moment would definitely make me the unreasonable asshole.
Kiba took a second to consider her answer, pushing a lock of her excessively long blond hair over one ear and then readjusting her grip on the school bag she was carrying with her - the picture of a refined noble woman, which I knew she definitely was not.
Then again, the original Kiba in the story I remembered had been kind of the refined butler minion type so, I guess this tracked.
"My mom will keep him busy for a minute arguing about something inconsequential," I said dismissively when she glanced at the door instead of answering me.
"Still-" She cautioned me, and I rolled my eyes at her.
"I also already told my papa about you, so it doesn't actually matter if he hears you," I pointed out.
"Are you sure that's entirely safe? They seemed… normal," She said, with seemingly genuine concern for my family in her voice.
"Because not knowing what might kill them will definitely stop it from killing them," I retorted.
"That's-" Kiba looked like she wanted to retort, releasing her two handed grip on her bag and cocking on hip like she was about to lecture me, but my papa chose that moment to shoulder his way through the door.
"Bye! I love you!" My mom sing songed after us.
"Love you to mom!" I replied automatically in tandem with my papa's own, more subdued, declaration of; "Love you Tasha."
Then he closed the door behind himself and glanced between the two of us like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to say.
"She's magic. No idea why she's here. We fought zombies last night," I explained with all of the bluntness he'd taught me to respond to him with.
"Mmm. Did you get hurt?" He asked me pointedly.
"Nah," I replied with a lackadaisical shrug while also deliberately not mentioning all the emotional turmoil I'd suffered last night in lieu of any physical injury.
"Is it going to be a problem?" He pressed, scanning our surroundings with a nonplussed but diligent look, like he expected a walking corpse to shamble off the street at any moment, before grunting and heading towards the car.
"Maybe. Necromancer guy ran away. The locals say they'll deal with it," I said somewhat bitterly.
"Is that normal? Common?" He asked, turning his head with the front door of the car open before actually getting in to shoot a questioning look at Kiba.
Kiba hadn't moved an inch from where she was when my papa left the house, and was offering the two of us a somewhat offput look at the entire, brief, exchange. Upon seeing my papa directed his attention towards her, she blinked once- which was about as much as I could expect in terms of a physical response to surprise from the otherwise doll like woman- and quickly moved to catch up with us.
"Kuoh is territory held at the border between several other large powers, and is frequently used as an egress point by people attempting to flee into, what I imagine you would describe as 'other jurisdictions'. We're attempting to patch the holes that let them in, but a blanket ban on teleportation simply isn't possible with our resources for the entire area of the city," She informed us primly, eyeing my papa like she was re-evaluating how dangerous he might be.
Which made sense I guess. I knew he sounded way too calm about all of this bullshit, but I know deep down inside he was probably massively frustrated by his ability to do or interact with any of it in any meaningful way.
We all got into the car, pausing the conversation for a moment, and I took a further few seconds to decide if I was going to sit in the back with Kiba, or the front with papa, before ultimately deciding I'd rather be in the front.
Keeping an eye on the girl was pointless when she could execute us both before I was aware she had even moved, and she was, as far as I was aware, friendly if nothing else.
Even if I couldn't ever quite tell how much of that attitude was genuine, and how much was based on an ulterior motive.
My papa started the car, and we pulled onto the narrow road in front of the house, leaving me glad we had one of the few houses in the area that even had a driveway when most people here seemed to just make do with parking their vehicles on the road in front of their homes.
"So you're… friends?" My papa said after a brief period of silence, the man being no better at being social than I was on a good day.
"I… wouldn't want to presume," Kiba demurred, leaving me to answer to question when my papa turned to look at me out of the corner of his eye instead.
"I mean… if you want to think of it that way? I don't, uh, hate you guys. Sorry I know I was kind of… pissy… last night…" I trailed off.
"Don't concern yourself, Cole-san. None of us hold it against you, and we do understand your frustration," Kiba offered.
"So something did happen," papa surmised with a sharp downturn of his eyebrows.
"I… probably could have killed the wizard guy right away last night, when he thought I was there to talk to him," I conceded, hating how quiet and subdued I sounded when I said it.
"You're sixteen. You shouldn't be killing anyone," papa growled, his grip on the steering wheel of the car tightening to the point I could hear the creak of the leather.
"He-!" I started to argue, automatically wanting to defend myself even though I hadn't actually been accused of anything.
"Cole-san reasonably left the defense and management of the situation to us, and in our official capacity as rulers of the area we failed to stop the offender from escaping when negotiations broke down. He held himself admirably and honorably," Kiba cut me off strongly and with significantly more force and intention in her voice than I was used to from her.
My shock and confusion must have been evident on my face, or my body language, even from behind, because the blond girl turned her smile on me and continued.
"He was of great help to us, and we have already assured him that resources will be directed towards keeping yourself and your family safe for the duration of the emergency. I hope you don't mind," She finished.
I blinked dazedly.
"Is… that why you were here this morning?" I asked in confusion.
"I had my familiar keep watch of your home in the event that there was an emergency. While you are at school with us, I assume you need no such guard, but we'll have each member of your family guarded in the same way when they separate from eachother," She explained seriously.
That was… huh. That was actually kind of alot, when I thought about it. Sirzechs peerage, as far I was aware, consisted of basically just four people. If each one of them had just a single familiar, then, divided between my entire family and assuming they weren't going to be watching me because I could protect myself…
They were basically using their entire surveillance system to keep an eye on my family for me.
I could… kind of understand the logic, if I assumed that Sirzechs was gambling on investing in me so that I would join him later, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate it, but…
"You're spying on us?" my papa simplified.
Kiba shook her head in the negative, just once, before replying.
"Guarding. Cole-san extracted a promise that nothing would happen to any of you, and the Gremory take the topic of family very seriously," She informed him.
I grimaced, kind of wishing she hadn't said that.
My papa, again, was not an idiot. The second she gave him a name to research, he was probably going to research it. Aaaaaand then he was probably going to find out that the name was primarily associated with one of Solomons demons. Aaaaand then he was probably going to-
Gnosis. A knowing came upon me, and I became dimly aware of a new, second, djinn named Cannon, akin to Gasp now residing within my soul.
Somewhat ironically given my train of thought, this one made explosions. Fiery… deadly… explosions.
On the one hand, cool, I now had access to an offensive spell.
On the other hand.
The present problem still remained.
"Papa," I interjected before the gruff man could continue to pry more information out of Kiba with vaguely aggressive questioning.
Both he and the blond turned to me as I spoke, and I sighed, even as the school hovered into view ahead of us.
"They're devils. Like, from hell. Only, hell has shopping malls now, I guess, so they're really just normal teenagers who can throw fireballs," I ground out as fast as I could.
"None of us are particularly competent magicians actually-"
"Kiba. Fucking, please," I begged the woman to shut up for a second, dropping my face into my hands in exasperation as my papa very pointedly pulled to the side of the road and parked instead of taking us the rest of the way to the school.
Then he twisted around to stare at me, not… angry… per se, but clearly not happy either.
By the time he died, my papa definitely didn't believe in god. I know that for a fact. However, when I was younger I could remember going to church a bunch fo times so…
"They're… probably not evil?" I offered weakly. He swivelled his head to stare at Kiba like he was only just now seeing her, and raised a finger to point rudely at her.
"You a succubus? You touch my son and I'll-"
"Papa!" I shrieked in embarrassment, yanking his pointing hand away from her.
"Succubi aren't real, sir. The species is just 'Devil', in general," Kiba offered as primly as ever, clearly not threatened in the slightest by the large angry man now glaring at her.
He continued to glare for a few seconds, before exhaling sharply, and turning back towards me, clearly trying to ignore Kiba for the moment.
"So the city is owned by hell?" He pressed, clearly just trying to understand the situation as best he could.
And probably also seriously considering moving back to Canada, job be damned.
"What I said before about their whole… medieval nobility thing was still pretty accurate. It's less hell and more a single family that happens to be from hell owns the place. And uh, probably the school?" I questioned, turning to Kiba for confirmation who nodded politely at me.
"…should we start going to church?" Papa asked seriously.
"Pass. They're just people from a really far away place papa, I promise. Like… like you're not a viking just because you've got the ancestry right?" I tried to explain. Actually, funnily enough, I remember inheriting a bag of carved runes from papa when he died. That was kind of ironic actually.
Oh. Oh I probably shouldn't have mentioned that. The grouchy look papa was giving me turned speculative in an instant, and I almost had to believe I knew what he was going to say before he said it when he twisted around to look at Kiba again.
"Can anyone learn magic?" He asked, suddenly polite.
God damn it. Papa why do you have to be such a fucking nerd? I mean. I was the same way, and would probably be just about dying to pick up some spellcasting ability if I knew it was possible normally, but I kind of had bigger fish to fry at the moment. I had basically no idea what my power was going to throw at me at any given moment, and even more importantly than that? I could barely speak the native language of this country.
Forget spellcasting, I was going to be struggling just to graduate from high school.
"There are a number of organizations that engage in teaching people such things," Kiba began carefully, before slowly turning her head to stare straight at me. "But I'm sure access to some primers might be arranged, for a price," she finished in a business like tone that sent a shiver down my spine.
Papa's face crumples into another glare basically immediately.
"They don't do souls anymore papa. She probably means like, money or something," I hurried to correct his most likely misunderstanding.
Left unsaid, was the rapidly mounting pressure I was feeling to say 'yes' when Sirzechs inevitably asked me to join up. I felt like I was being bribed, and had no idea how to feel about it. It was a much more practical and upfront recruitment strategy than what I was expecting, which was more along the lines of a… I dunno, climactic shounen declaration of friendship?
This was that kind of world after all.
But this? This was just… uncomfortably calculated. It felt kind of like I was being cornered but with, like, kindness? Wealth? I imagine this must be what it feels like to be scouted by an extremely high profile company or sports team.
I seriously had to remind myself that Devils didn't get a reputation for being extremely thorough for nothing.
"How-" I heard my papa start to say, then felt my eyes dilate and my head smack into the headrest of my seat in the car as my power chose that moment to produce another… another giant fucking insect.
I wasn't even mad anymore. I was just… going to accept it. Blessedly, for all what I had acquired was an oversized insect, it was also, a motherfucking pokemon.
I was completely engrossed in scrambling through the series of cages that apparently made up my soul, fully expecting to find a super cute, more or less fully sapient, chibi like pet creature - Grubbin in the games looked like nothing more so than an insect themed plushie, and I could really use something non threatening at this point, when—
"Son of a bitch!" I yelled out loud, pausing when I realized both Kiba and my papa were staring at me with varying degrees of concern.
They both knew what it looked like when my power was firing off, so they didn't seem concerned for my health, but they were just as obviously concerned by my sudden exclamation regardless.
"New… new creature. Another horrifying giant insect. It stopped being funny several phobias ago," I growled, squinting into the middle distance as I examined the Grubbin in its cage.
It. Didn't. Look. Like. A. Cartoon.
It looked exactly like someone had scaled up an actual grub, given it a bunch of odd extra features like massively oversized pincers, which was saying a lot given the maggot-like creature was thicker than my arm and nearly as long, and then given it the ability to say its name.
It wasn't cute. It was fucking uncanny.
I mentioned reading that story a short time ago? Worm? Well the protagonist of that story eventually just sort of completely lost the inherent squick most people feel when a bug is too close to them, or touching them, and I was starting to get worried I was going to have to manage a similar feat because clearly someone was playing a fucking prank on me.
My papa and Kiba exchanged a look at that, before slowly returning to… whatever they'd been talking about while I was distracted.
"If that's all, Cole-san?" Kiba asked with a sly smile, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking to my papa and not me because of the whole… first names are for close friends thing Japanese people had going on.
"Hmn," My father grunted in agreement, before restarting the car and driving us the rest of the way to the school. By this point we were dangerously close to being genuinely late because of our brief stop, but I couldn't help but ask what I'd missed.
"Sorry, what's going on?" I asked in a daze, really hoping my papa hadn't made an actual, literal, deal with the devil in the thirty seconds I hadn't been paying attention.
"I can't make any deals on behalf of my King," Kiba began, and I watched my papa absorb the terminology with thinly veiled interest before she continued. "But I suspect he would be more than amenable to meeting to talk terms after the current issue has been resolved."
My papa and I grunted in unison at that, him because he was obviously annoyed by the delay, and worried by the 'current issue', for me if nothing else, and me, because I had a very firm idea of how to resolve said issue.
Not that I mentioned that in the car. Papa wouldn't want me to get involved, and Kiba seemed perfectly happy keeping me at arms length from the problem after my outburst last night, so I doubted either of them would especially approve of what I had planned.
After all, if I could use my 'useless' creatures to pull data points out of the ether, then I'd only have to do it three times while flying around the city to triangulate that motherfucker.
"Is something funny, Cole-san?" Kiba asked me as we disembarked from the car and started to power walk to the school.
"Huh?"
"You were… what's the word… leering?" She said, lifting a hand to tap her own cheek to emphasize her point.
"Nnnnno I wasn't," I refuted, speeding up to try to end the conversation by slipping into class before she could comment.
I probably shouldn't have bothered. Trying to outrun a speedster was a pointless endeavour in the first place.
"You were, but I won't pursue the issue if you don't want to explain," She said, then had the gall to sigh at me in exasperation.
"Acting awfully friendly today aren't we?" I snarked at her instead of responding to the accusation.
When in doubt, deflect, deflect, deflect!
"I have your measure now, I think. You aren't a bad boy," She said with a careless shrug. I felt the desperate urge to correct her away from the way she said 'boy' instead of 'man', but the way she said it sent an uncomfortable shiver down my spine and I had no idea why, which gave her an opportunity to continue before I could argue with her about it.
"And you did say I should consider you a friend," She said somewhat teasingly, before pulling the door of our classroom open and sliding inside, using my own idea against me and effectively ending the conversation as the entire rest of our class twisted around to watch us walk in together.
The vague sounds of Japanese gossip immediately filled the room, and I felt my eyes twitch as, to just to add insult to injury, my power missed and came back with nothing in particular, which had the annoying side effect of stunning me in the doorway for a moment.
I'm sure I must have looked reaaaaal cool freezing up like that the second everyone turned to look at me.
Just… the coolest dear in the headlights ever. Yup.
Fuck.
But once all the tension I was feeling had simmered down to what I could maybe describe as a more 'normal' background amount of dread, a lot of the adrenaline that had been keeping me moving faded, leaving me feeling kind of strung out.
It wouldn't have been the first fourty eight hour stint of uninterrupted consciousness I'd dealt with, and in fact, I was now young again which meant I was even better suited to it than I used to be, but well….
Despite my assurances that I was fine (I'm always fine, eventually), Sirzechs insisted.
So naturally I spent the majority of the rest of the night staring with bloodshot eyes at the ceiling of my unfamiliar bedroom, not bothering to shower, or change out of my clothes, or do much of anything once I snuck back into my house.
It didn't matter that I was pretty sure all the zombies should have died when fuckass stopped casting his spell or whatever. It didn't matter that the Gremory group were probably out there combing the city to make sure there were no stragglers.
I felt like I'd left the stove on and gone to work, and it sucked.
I was so keyed up that I even kept Reaper summoned, sitting on the roof of my house, with orders to make sure nothing attacked us while I 'rested'. A handful of hours later, I learned that the little guy could literally fold himself into the shape of a very ominous looking treasure chest, when he got bored and crawled through my open window into my room. The fact that he could seamlessly crawl through the seemingly much smaller aperture would probably have been nightmare inducing for anyone else, but for me it was a small comfort I didn't know I needed.
Mind you. The room was still too fucking small for him, and he effectively took up every free inch of floor space I had when he was doing it, but, somehow, I just couldn't manage to fall asleep until I was halfway off my bed, with my left arm draped precariously over the top of the faux 'chest' Reaper had become, with one leg dangling on the floor.
That happened… maybe an hour before it was time for me to wake up for the day. So. As you might imagine, when my Mom slammed the door to my room open and started haranguing me awake, pausing only to harangue me about where I'd gotten the clearly expensive looking piece of 'furniture', I was… not in a good mood.
"You should shower," My Papa said as I plopped down on the couch next to him with a piece of toast in hand. My mom didn't make breakfast every morning. Fairly often, sure, but with exception for my youngest brother, who was now roughly six years old, the rest of us were more than capable of buttering toast.
"…probably," I conceded, making no move to get up and do so, and instead, crunching into my toast.
"Get a plate," My papa snapped off instantly, before I could take a second bite.
I say snapped not as in 'got mad', so much as the speed and seriousness of his statement brought to mind an abrupt snapping motion. I was briefly caught off guard by the order, because I, again, was not accustomed to having an adult with power over me anymore, and had long since dubbed the inconvenience of creating more dishes I would have to was later greater than of having to sweep up some crumbs at some nebulous later date.
I also had a fucking headache, of the kind reserved solely for the sleepless, and felt like there were midgets inside my skull pounding on the back of my eyeballs for funsies.
"It's fine," I snapped right back, the exact same way I would if one of my little brothers was giving me shit.
My papa and I stared at each other for ten consecutive seconds at that, until he grunted irately at me and got up on his own, swiftly returning with a saucer for me to eat over.
I, not being a completely ungrateful dickhead, accepted the plate wordlessly, and we both continued on as though nothing had happened.
"I'll drive you to school. Take a shower." My papa repeated himself.
I grimaced.
"It's just one day-" I argued - definitely not whined - at him.
Look I was tired. Sue me. If I could get away with staying in bed and not going to school at all, I'd have done so.
Unfortunately, my argument to that effect got cut off in the middle of my sentence by my power withdrawing from the primordial soup with two distinct objects in tow for me to choose from.
One was a fucking fungus.
Like, just straight up, a semi-sentient fungus. 'SCP-2379'. I didn't know all that much about it, and wouldn't unless I chose to absorb it into my menagerie, but the cliff notes information I got from a glance at it told me it was one of those exponential world ending threats that the SCP setting loved so god damn much. This, I instantly opted to discard, and so my power automatically reeled in the other option, which was a modifier called… 'Contingent Summoning'.
"-you're going to smell at school. If you don't feel like you can make it through the whole day, go to the office and call me, so I can pick you up at lunch, but at least try to…" My papa was dictating to me before registering my mini-stroke and grunting in irritation.
Whether that was because of the supernatural bullshit he couldn't control or do anything about rearing its head, or because he was irked that I probably hadn't heard half of what he said, I wasn't quite sure.
"Wuh?" I blurted at him, the combination of my exhaustion and the disorientation of having to parse through my gnosis before being dumped back in my oh so limited reality leaving me briefly at a loss for words.
Papa looked at me consideringly for a second, before grunting and turning back to the television. "Shower. Now." He ordered. He punctuated the demand with a look that I hadn't seen a very long time. The kind of silent glare that always popped up on him right before he genuinely lost his temper, usually when he thought someone or something was being illogical and stupid in a way that profoundly inconvenienced him.
Now look, as a normal adult, with a reasonable logical understanding of the world, I perfectly well understood that parents, under most circumstances, were well within their rights to expect a certain minimum amount of obedience from their children, particularly in the arenas of hygiene and cleanliness. That's… kind of just how you teach kids stuff. They certainly aren't going to develop good habits on their own.
Simultaneously with that thought though.
Wow, I really fucking hated being told what to do.
Still, recognizing that I was being, from an adults point of view, a fucking brat, I took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then exhaled sharply.
Then I stood, finished off my breakfast, and dragged my still conscious corpse to the bathroom to shower.
Fun fact about the house that threw me off, and probably contributed significantly to how uncomfortable I found using the bath here - it was on the main floor. I don't know if that's really all that abnormal by western standards, but from my point of view, every home I had ever lived in had the bath on the second floor. Well away from anyone who might be casually meandering around the house.
Don't ask me why being able to hear my family moving around outside the bathroom bothered me so much, because I couldn't put it into words if I tried. It was just… different than I was used to. Hell, the layout of the bathroom itself was different than I was uses to. I guess when papa said the money here was good he wasn't kidding, because the bathroom was… well for one it wasn't a bathroom.
When I think of a bathroom, I think of a room that has a toilet and a tub in it.
This was not that. There was, in fact, a separate, closet sized room not to far away that contained the toilet. This room contained a convoluted and wonky extended tile setup. It was way to big for my sensibilities, especially compared to how compact literally everything else in the house was. There was a wide open space with faucets sticking out of the walls and two separate shower heads above them, and then past that there was a raised, knee high wall, that could be filled with water like a bath tub even though it looked like a really tiny fucking pool.
It was all. Fucking. Weird.
And I mean, yeah, yeah, culture shock and all that, but unlike the version of me who would have theoretically been prepared enough for moving to this country to learn some of the language, this had basically all just jumped out of the nearest sewer and cold cocked me. The only reason I wasn't all that concerned by the morally dubious fact that I had stolen someones body was that I had body-jacked myself.
And no one hates that guy more than me.
Whatever. I shook off the steadily more dour thoughts that were consuming me, a not uncommon tendency when I am exhausted, and got down to showering. About half way through washing my hair a thought occurred to me, and I couldn't help but test something that had dawned on me with the acquisition of my most recent ability.
Contingent Summoning did what it said on the tin. I could tag a creature with a specific summoning condition, and when that condition was met, the creature would be summoned forth using my power automatically and on its own. There were obvious use cases for this. Things like 'if I am about to be injured' or 'someone tries to attack me from behind' were low hanging fruit. Useful 'traps' to setup ahead of time as, well, contingencies to make up for my obviously lacking reaction time compared to the more speedy supernaturals that I knew probably existed in this world. I'd already noted that Kiba was basically a speedster from my point of view, so if she really wanted to kill me, there probably wasn't much I could actually do about it.
Until now.
Now I could grab my Tyrant Guard, tag it with 'if I would otherwise be in danger of lethal injury, summon between me and the threat' and it would theoretically happen exactly like that to shield me before the hit could land.
All without my actual input.
There were a couple of downsides, like the fact that I was locked out of summoning that particular member of my swarm while it was abiding by those conditions. But even still.
Did I -
I paused to ride out the momentary stumble caused by my power reaching out and grabbing nothing before returning to my original train of thought.
Did I actually need to be personally aware of the information being used to trigger a contingent summon? It'd be pretty useless if it couldn't respond to an ambush unless I was already aware of the ambush, so that shouldn't be the case, but…
Closing my eyes while the hot water flowed down over me, I mentally navigated to the cage containing the totally normal tree frog I hadn't yet seen a real use for, and directed a 'condition' at it, impressing upon its cage the need to open itself when a car not belonging to my family went past on the street outside of the house.
If this worked the way I thought it did…
I continued my somewhat slow paced shower - have I mentioned that I didn't really care about going to school today? - for another few minutes, before there was abruptly a very annoyed tree frog doing its best to hop away form the steaming hot water around me.
I stared after the creature blankly for several seconds, before feeling a wide, malicious grin spread across my face.
I could work with this.
It was somewhat convoluted, and every time I did it I effectively had to give up access to one of my monsters for twenty four hours, but this was pretty much the perfect way to use my more 'useless' minions. I used to be an avid reader of a story called Worm, where people who had the ability to pull information from the ether were called Thinkers. That setting had a whole bunch of weird limitations and blocks on what information you could derive that way, but as far as I was aware this one had no such information control techniques. I mean, it probably did have some kind of anti-scry effect somewhere, but I doubted even that would work on this new ability of mine. I didn't get the impression my ability was actually 'looking' for information to make contingent summoning work.
It was more like… if something was true, the effect simply happened. It was like a kind of weird, quantum entanglement effect.
Absent mindedly, I unsummoned the frog rather than leave it to suffer in an environment it clearly wasn't comfortable or happy in, while pondering what I could do with this. I felt energized all of a sudden. With this I could- I could-
Go to fucking school, I guess. Ugh.
Just like that, all will to live once more left my body, and I somehow felt even more tired than I had previously despite nothing really changing for me in that brief span of time.
"Jona! Hurry up-" My papa yelled at me from the outside the bathroom, drawing a flinch from me. Ugh. Being a teenager was so stupid. My parents really wanted me to go to school. If I was living in your typical isekai scenario with no one to rely on but myself I'd probably just drop out. Unfortunately, I wasn't, and so I had to do the right thing or whatever and actually attend. At least, that's what I thought he was rushing me for. Until he kept talking.
"-one of your friends came to pick you up!"
…one of my what the fuck now?
"What?!" I yelled back at him in honest confusion, rushing through the last of my ablutions and hurrying over to grab my clothes off the floor.
They stunk, and needed washing, but they were also the only uniform I had, and not wearing them literally wasn't an option, so everyone else would just have to deal with it.
Well. That, or the cloying scent of way too much axe body spray.
Ugh. I hate being a teenager again.
I hurriedly crammed myself into my underwear and pants, before deciding to just cram the rest of my clothes under one arm so I could shove the bathroom door open and rush into the hallway outside. The bathroom was at the end of a hallway that ran parallel to the stairs to the second floor, and the… I dunno what to call it, but, the 'toilet' room was to the right of that hallway, effectively opposite the stairs. You could actually see straight from one end of the house to the other, directly to the front door, from the bathroom, which was something I learned at that exact moment, because I ended up dripping wet, not wearing a shirt, staring wide eyed at Kiba as my Mom chatted with her just inside the said front door.
We made eye contact over my Mom's shoulder, and I could see my papa watching the interaction in my peripheral vision, leaning over the back of the couch so just the top half of his face with even my field of view.
Kiba smiled beatifically at me.
I felt my eye twitch at her nonchalance, and, more importantly than that, invasion of my home, such as it were.
Thankfully, I was not in fact, a blushing anime girl, so instead of freaking out I just grunted in annoyance, and threw my shirt over my head, fighting it down over the rest of me in a rumpled and disheveled looking way as I made my way into the living room.
"Yo?" I half asked, then flinched when my power dumped another summoning modifier on me called 'Magic Boost' that just… effectively doubled the benefits, duration, damage, etc, etc of any one of my summons abilities that you could consider 'magic' in nature.
It was neat but not game changing, so I filed it away for later consideration.
"Good morning, Cole-san!" She said with a demure kind of cheer that wigged me out. Mostly because I couldn't tell how sincere it was. Kiba's stepford smiler thing would probably not even be recognizeable to me if I didn't have some degree of foreknowledge about her character, but with it, I could barely parse how much of any given one of her actions was just a mask. Since I was paranoid and not very good at being social in the first place, this led to me almost always erring on the side of caution, and assuming it was all fake, which wasn't a particularly comfortable feeling to have around someone you knew could kill you with relative ease.
"Heeeeey, Kiba… uh… whaaaat are you doing here?" I asked slowly, darting a glance to my papa, who I could tell had already figured out by now that this had to be one of those people I was talking about yesterday of a magical persuasion.
How did I know this?
Mostly because he was staring at the lithe blond girl with enough intensity that I could see my Mom becoming visibly angry over it.
I took the opportunity while waiting for Kiba to respond to my question to visibly step between my parents, distracting my mom with the prospect of being nosey about my social life.
"Jona! You didn't tell me you'd made any… friends," She instantly crooned at me, making me flinch at her particular tone of voice. My mom was one of those people that fundamentally didn't believe friendship could exist between men and women. To her, any attempt to do so was just a pretext to be something more.
"I mean, we only just met, and, uh," I blabbered, way too tired to find conjure a better deflection than that while trying to maintain eye contact with Kiba, who lifted a hand to giggle daintily behind it.
"Mah, Cole-san and I are in the same class. I'm one of the only other english speakers, so it seemed natural that we would get along," She demurred.
"Oh, have you been in the country long? We just moved here and I still have a hard time when I'm at the grocery store—" My Mom rattled off heartily, easily allowing herself to be sidetracked into a somewhat lengthy diatribe about how the other neighbourhood moms seemed have their own little gossip group that she wanted in on.
I mean. That's not exactly how she said it, but that's what she meant, for sure.
Kiba for her part, just kind of smiled at the both of us, while my mom ranted, or, gossiped, or… whatever it is older women do when they're bored, social, and looking to make conversation.
I had to assume there was some method to the madness, because my Mom had always been infinitely more capable of forging connections with people than I had - a character flaw she liked to bring up every now and then when she felt the need to guilt me into doing something.
"Mom," I eventually interjected awkwardly when it became self evident that she was more than happy to absent mindedly stand in the entryway and chat.
My mom turned a somewhat questioning look on me for a second before seeming to remember what time it was.
"Oh, shit, sorry! Alan! Alan can you drive them both?" She pivoted immediately, turning a questioning look on my papa and doing her best to say the 'shit' part of that sentence under her breath.
The great irony of my mom was that she hated it when we swore, but I learned basically all my curse words from her in the first place. Not that she was verbally abusive or anything. I don't think she'd ever swore at me in her life. However, she did have a penchant for cussing just about everything else that inconvenienced or bothered her, which I found positively hilarious given how bad she was at hiding that fact.
…fuck, I was gonna have to tell my mom about all of this magic bullshit wasn't I? It wasn't fair to just tell papa, no matter how much better I felt he was going to take it than she would.
I always hated reading stories where characters arbitrarily kept secrets like that from one another.
Which is god damn ironic, because I was more than willing to append the thought with 'later' and summarily shuffle it to the back of my head as my papa unceremoniously grunted an agreement at her and circle the couch to start putting his shoes on.
"Why, uh, why don't we wait outside while he finds his keys and stuff?" I offered uncomfortably, not quite physically shoving Kiba back through the front door - but only because I had to walk around her to open it first.
"They seem very nice," She offered by way of the most bland platitudes possible.
"…Why… look I don't want to get angry here or anything but…" I trailed off, trying to thread a line between 'why the fuck are you here' and basic politeness. Truthfully, Kiba being here didn't bother me that much, it was just unexpected. And I hated unexpected bullshit. Still, as I've said before and will probably say again, I've read a book or two, and snapping at her in this moment would definitely make me the unreasonable asshole.
Kiba took a second to consider her answer, pushing a lock of her excessively long blond hair over one ear and then readjusting her grip on the school bag she was carrying with her - the picture of a refined noble woman, which I knew she definitely was not.
Then again, the original Kiba in the story I remembered had been kind of the refined butler minion type so, I guess this tracked.
"My mom will keep him busy for a minute arguing about something inconsequential," I said dismissively when she glanced at the door instead of answering me.
"Still-" She cautioned me, and I rolled my eyes at her.
"I also already told my papa about you, so it doesn't actually matter if he hears you," I pointed out.
"Are you sure that's entirely safe? They seemed… normal," She said, with seemingly genuine concern for my family in her voice.
"Because not knowing what might kill them will definitely stop it from killing them," I retorted.
"That's-" Kiba looked like she wanted to retort, releasing her two handed grip on her bag and cocking on hip like she was about to lecture me, but my papa chose that moment to shoulder his way through the door.
"Bye! I love you!" My mom sing songed after us.
"Love you to mom!" I replied automatically in tandem with my papa's own, more subdued, declaration of; "Love you Tasha."
Then he closed the door behind himself and glanced between the two of us like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to say.
"She's magic. No idea why she's here. We fought zombies last night," I explained with all of the bluntness he'd taught me to respond to him with.
"Mmm. Did you get hurt?" He asked me pointedly.
"Nah," I replied with a lackadaisical shrug while also deliberately not mentioning all the emotional turmoil I'd suffered last night in lieu of any physical injury.
"Is it going to be a problem?" He pressed, scanning our surroundings with a nonplussed but diligent look, like he expected a walking corpse to shamble off the street at any moment, before grunting and heading towards the car.
"Maybe. Necromancer guy ran away. The locals say they'll deal with it," I said somewhat bitterly.
"Is that normal? Common?" He asked, turning his head with the front door of the car open before actually getting in to shoot a questioning look at Kiba.
Kiba hadn't moved an inch from where she was when my papa left the house, and was offering the two of us a somewhat offput look at the entire, brief, exchange. Upon seeing my papa directed his attention towards her, she blinked once- which was about as much as I could expect in terms of a physical response to surprise from the otherwise doll like woman- and quickly moved to catch up with us.
"Kuoh is territory held at the border between several other large powers, and is frequently used as an egress point by people attempting to flee into, what I imagine you would describe as 'other jurisdictions'. We're attempting to patch the holes that let them in, but a blanket ban on teleportation simply isn't possible with our resources for the entire area of the city," She informed us primly, eyeing my papa like she was re-evaluating how dangerous he might be.
Which made sense I guess. I knew he sounded way too calm about all of this bullshit, but I know deep down inside he was probably massively frustrated by his ability to do or interact with any of it in any meaningful way.
We all got into the car, pausing the conversation for a moment, and I took a further few seconds to decide if I was going to sit in the back with Kiba, or the front with papa, before ultimately deciding I'd rather be in the front.
Keeping an eye on the girl was pointless when she could execute us both before I was aware she had even moved, and she was, as far as I was aware, friendly if nothing else.
Even if I couldn't ever quite tell how much of that attitude was genuine, and how much was based on an ulterior motive.
My papa started the car, and we pulled onto the narrow road in front of the house, leaving me glad we had one of the few houses in the area that even had a driveway when most people here seemed to just make do with parking their vehicles on the road in front of their homes.
"So you're… friends?" My papa said after a brief period of silence, the man being no better at being social than I was on a good day.
"I… wouldn't want to presume," Kiba demurred, leaving me to answer to question when my papa turned to look at me out of the corner of his eye instead.
"I mean… if you want to think of it that way? I don't, uh, hate you guys. Sorry I know I was kind of… pissy… last night…" I trailed off.
"Don't concern yourself, Cole-san. None of us hold it against you, and we do understand your frustration," Kiba offered.
"So something did happen," papa surmised with a sharp downturn of his eyebrows.
"I… probably could have killed the wizard guy right away last night, when he thought I was there to talk to him," I conceded, hating how quiet and subdued I sounded when I said it.
"You're sixteen. You shouldn't be killing anyone," papa growled, his grip on the steering wheel of the car tightening to the point I could hear the creak of the leather.
"He-!" I started to argue, automatically wanting to defend myself even though I hadn't actually been accused of anything.
"Cole-san reasonably left the defense and management of the situation to us, and in our official capacity as rulers of the area we failed to stop the offender from escaping when negotiations broke down. He held himself admirably and honorably," Kiba cut me off strongly and with significantly more force and intention in her voice than I was used to from her.
My shock and confusion must have been evident on my face, or my body language, even from behind, because the blond girl turned her smile on me and continued.
"He was of great help to us, and we have already assured him that resources will be directed towards keeping yourself and your family safe for the duration of the emergency. I hope you don't mind," She finished.
I blinked dazedly.
"Is… that why you were here this morning?" I asked in confusion.
"I had my familiar keep watch of your home in the event that there was an emergency. While you are at school with us, I assume you need no such guard, but we'll have each member of your family guarded in the same way when they separate from eachother," She explained seriously.
That was… huh. That was actually kind of alot, when I thought about it. Sirzechs peerage, as far I was aware, consisted of basically just four people. If each one of them had just a single familiar, then, divided between my entire family and assuming they weren't going to be watching me because I could protect myself…
They were basically using their entire surveillance system to keep an eye on my family for me.
I could… kind of understand the logic, if I assumed that Sirzechs was gambling on investing in me so that I would join him later, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't appreciate it, but…
"You're spying on us?" my papa simplified.
Kiba shook her head in the negative, just once, before replying.
"Guarding. Cole-san extracted a promise that nothing would happen to any of you, and the Gremory take the topic of family very seriously," She informed him.
I grimaced, kind of wishing she hadn't said that.
My papa, again, was not an idiot. The second she gave him a name to research, he was probably going to research it. Aaaaaand then he was probably going to find out that the name was primarily associated with one of Solomons demons. Aaaaand then he was probably going to-
Gnosis. A knowing came upon me, and I became dimly aware of a new, second, djinn named Cannon, akin to Gasp now residing within my soul.
Somewhat ironically given my train of thought, this one made explosions. Fiery… deadly… explosions.
On the one hand, cool, I now had access to an offensive spell.
On the other hand.
The present problem still remained.
"Papa," I interjected before the gruff man could continue to pry more information out of Kiba with vaguely aggressive questioning.
Both he and the blond turned to me as I spoke, and I sighed, even as the school hovered into view ahead of us.
"They're devils. Like, from hell. Only, hell has shopping malls now, I guess, so they're really just normal teenagers who can throw fireballs," I ground out as fast as I could.
"None of us are particularly competent magicians actually-"
"Kiba. Fucking, please," I begged the woman to shut up for a second, dropping my face into my hands in exasperation as my papa very pointedly pulled to the side of the road and parked instead of taking us the rest of the way to the school.
Then he twisted around to stare at me, not… angry… per se, but clearly not happy either.
By the time he died, my papa definitely didn't believe in god. I know that for a fact. However, when I was younger I could remember going to church a bunch fo times so…
"They're… probably not evil?" I offered weakly. He swivelled his head to stare at Kiba like he was only just now seeing her, and raised a finger to point rudely at her.
"You a succubus? You touch my son and I'll-"
"Papa!" I shrieked in embarrassment, yanking his pointing hand away from her.
"Succubi aren't real, sir. The species is just 'Devil', in general," Kiba offered as primly as ever, clearly not threatened in the slightest by the large angry man now glaring at her.
He continued to glare for a few seconds, before exhaling sharply, and turning back towards me, clearly trying to ignore Kiba for the moment.
"So the city is owned by hell?" He pressed, clearly just trying to understand the situation as best he could.
And probably also seriously considering moving back to Canada, job be damned.
"What I said before about their whole… medieval nobility thing was still pretty accurate. It's less hell and more a single family that happens to be from hell owns the place. And uh, probably the school?" I questioned, turning to Kiba for confirmation who nodded politely at me.
"…should we start going to church?" Papa asked seriously.
"Pass. They're just people from a really far away place papa, I promise. Like… like you're not a viking just because you've got the ancestry right?" I tried to explain. Actually, funnily enough, I remember inheriting a bag of carved runes from papa when he died. That was kind of ironic actually.
Oh. Oh I probably shouldn't have mentioned that. The grouchy look papa was giving me turned speculative in an instant, and I almost had to believe I knew what he was going to say before he said it when he twisted around to look at Kiba again.
"Can anyone learn magic?" He asked, suddenly polite.
God damn it. Papa why do you have to be such a fucking nerd? I mean. I was the same way, and would probably be just about dying to pick up some spellcasting ability if I knew it was possible normally, but I kind of had bigger fish to fry at the moment. I had basically no idea what my power was going to throw at me at any given moment, and even more importantly than that? I could barely speak the native language of this country.
Forget spellcasting, I was going to be struggling just to graduate from high school.
"There are a number of organizations that engage in teaching people such things," Kiba began carefully, before slowly turning her head to stare straight at me. "But I'm sure access to some primers might be arranged, for a price," she finished in a business like tone that sent a shiver down my spine.
Papa's face crumples into another glare basically immediately.
"They don't do souls anymore papa. She probably means like, money or something," I hurried to correct his most likely misunderstanding.
Left unsaid, was the rapidly mounting pressure I was feeling to say 'yes' when Sirzechs inevitably asked me to join up. I felt like I was being bribed, and had no idea how to feel about it. It was a much more practical and upfront recruitment strategy than what I was expecting, which was more along the lines of a… I dunno, climactic shounen declaration of friendship?
This was that kind of world after all.
But this? This was just… uncomfortably calculated. It felt kind of like I was being cornered but with, like, kindness? Wealth? I imagine this must be what it feels like to be scouted by an extremely high profile company or sports team.
I seriously had to remind myself that Devils didn't get a reputation for being extremely thorough for nothing.
"How-" I heard my papa start to say, then felt my eyes dilate and my head smack into the headrest of my seat in the car as my power chose that moment to produce another… another giant fucking insect.
I wasn't even mad anymore. I was just… going to accept it. Blessedly, for all what I had acquired was an oversized insect, it was also, a motherfucking pokemon.
I was completely engrossed in scrambling through the series of cages that apparently made up my soul, fully expecting to find a super cute, more or less fully sapient, chibi like pet creature - Grubbin in the games looked like nothing more so than an insect themed plushie, and I could really use something non threatening at this point, when—
"Son of a bitch!" I yelled out loud, pausing when I realized both Kiba and my papa were staring at me with varying degrees of concern.
They both knew what it looked like when my power was firing off, so they didn't seem concerned for my health, but they were just as obviously concerned by my sudden exclamation regardless.
"New… new creature. Another horrifying giant insect. It stopped being funny several phobias ago," I growled, squinting into the middle distance as I examined the Grubbin in its cage.
It. Didn't. Look. Like. A. Cartoon.
It looked exactly like someone had scaled up an actual grub, given it a bunch of odd extra features like massively oversized pincers, which was saying a lot given the maggot-like creature was thicker than my arm and nearly as long, and then given it the ability to say its name.
It wasn't cute. It was fucking uncanny.
I mentioned reading that story a short time ago? Worm? Well the protagonist of that story eventually just sort of completely lost the inherent squick most people feel when a bug is too close to them, or touching them, and I was starting to get worried I was going to have to manage a similar feat because clearly someone was playing a fucking prank on me.
My papa and Kiba exchanged a look at that, before slowly returning to… whatever they'd been talking about while I was distracted.
"If that's all, Cole-san?" Kiba asked with a sly smile, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking to my papa and not me because of the whole… first names are for close friends thing Japanese people had going on.
"Hmn," My father grunted in agreement, before restarting the car and driving us the rest of the way to the school. By this point we were dangerously close to being genuinely late because of our brief stop, but I couldn't help but ask what I'd missed.
"Sorry, what's going on?" I asked in a daze, really hoping my papa hadn't made an actual, literal, deal with the devil in the thirty seconds I hadn't been paying attention.
"I can't make any deals on behalf of my King," Kiba began, and I watched my papa absorb the terminology with thinly veiled interest before she continued. "But I suspect he would be more than amenable to meeting to talk terms after the current issue has been resolved."
My papa and I grunted in unison at that, him because he was obviously annoyed by the delay, and worried by the 'current issue', for me if nothing else, and me, because I had a very firm idea of how to resolve said issue.
Not that I mentioned that in the car. Papa wouldn't want me to get involved, and Kiba seemed perfectly happy keeping me at arms length from the problem after my outburst last night, so I doubted either of them would especially approve of what I had planned.
After all, if I could use my 'useless' creatures to pull data points out of the ether, then I'd only have to do it three times while flying around the city to triangulate that motherfucker.
"Is something funny, Cole-san?" Kiba asked me as we disembarked from the car and started to power walk to the school.
"Huh?"
"You were… what's the word… leering?" She said, lifting a hand to tap her own cheek to emphasize her point.
"Nnnnno I wasn't," I refuted, speeding up to try to end the conversation by slipping into class before she could comment.
I probably shouldn't have bothered. Trying to outrun a speedster was a pointless endeavour in the first place.
"You were, but I won't pursue the issue if you don't want to explain," She said, then had the gall to sigh at me in exasperation.
"Acting awfully friendly today aren't we?" I snarked at her instead of responding to the accusation.
When in doubt, deflect, deflect, deflect!
"I have your measure now, I think. You aren't a bad boy," She said with a careless shrug. I felt the desperate urge to correct her away from the way she said 'boy' instead of 'man', but the way she said it sent an uncomfortable shiver down my spine and I had no idea why, which gave her an opportunity to continue before I could argue with her about it.
"And you did say I should consider you a friend," She said somewhat teasingly, before pulling the door of our classroom open and sliding inside, using my own idea against me and effectively ending the conversation as the entire rest of our class twisted around to watch us walk in together.
The vague sounds of Japanese gossip immediately filled the room, and I felt my eyes twitch as, to just to add insult to injury, my power missed and came back with nothing in particular, which had the annoying side effect of stunning me in the doorway for a moment.
I'm sure I must have looked reaaaaal cool freezing up like that the second everyone turned to look at me.
Just… the coolest dear in the headlights ever. Yup.
Fuck.
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