The Red String of Fate

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Since the manga of Shin Megami Tensei Devils Survivor 1 named the Hero as Kazuya Minegishi, I'll name him as such in this fanfic. Sorry for some OCCness in some of the characters but just chalk it up as the author's artistic license, okay? This fanfic is mainly Kazuya X Naoya with some non-con mixed in. The lemon parts will come a little later but they WILL come. The setting is after the game when you took Amane's path. I don't make any money making this fanfic and Shin Megami Tensei belongs to Atlus.

The first part of the fanfic is in the Main Character's POV.

Prologue: The Year Before

Its been a year since the incident.

A year since all of downtown Tokyo was locked down for seven days, with no electricity and any form of communication, leaving thousands of people without any contact with the outside world. A year since everyone within the Yamanote circle was left to the mercy of demons and the evil people that use them without any assistance from the government. A year since me and my friends summoned our first demons, became part of the Tokyo lockdown and survived.

What I didn't know back then is that things will never be the same again, for me and for everyone.

My name's Kazuya Minegishi, 18 years old, and for all intents and purposes, an ordinary high school student. But who I am and what I did was anything but. Tokyo has for most part returned back to normal and its people are now more resilient and grateful for having survived the ordeal. They're now more appreciative of the things they took for granted before. Ironic that "normal" life had to be obliterated in order for people to appreciate it. But for me, it'll never be normal again.

So let me reintroduce myself.

I am Abel, the Lost Child of God. The first human ever to be murdered and my brother Cain was the one who murdered me.

The crime of murder isn't new, even if it was committed by a family member. This sin has haunted the human race since time immemorial, and yet I'm still here, in this modern day and age. In truth, Abel's essence was scattered and resided in many people, as seeds of human potential. Most people live their lives not knowing that they have Abel's essence within them. However, I am the exception. The events that transpired during the lockdown and Abel's essence within me awoke my potential as the Lost Child.

So what exactly happened during the lockdown? By God, there were so many things that happened during those seven days it'd take hours just to explain it all. So I'll just tell you the important stuff, which is basically everything, hmm...I'll make it short.

I did mention demons before right? Well, these aren't the "personal demons" that everyone has. I mean literal demons, with fangs and claws and who knows what else. Well... I would know what else the demons are capable of. These demons started popping out all over Tokyo, causing chaos and destruction. And who would you guess to be in the middle of it? Yes, me and my friends Atsuro Kihara and Yuzu Tanigawa.

Why would we be there when we don't actually live in Tokyo? You see we were there to meet my cousin Naoya at Shibuya 901. This was weird in itself because he never showed up at all and had Yuzu deliver the modified Communication Players, COMPs for short, that he made to me and Atsuro, with the cryptic phrase "You'll all need these. Don't lose them." He can make stuff like that because he's a genius programmer. Atsuro, the self-proclaimed "Naoya's Number One apprentice", hacked the COMPs open and shortly afterward, we all received an email called a Laplace mail that's said to have the day's news only that the events recorded in the mail were at times advanced than the current time. The news within it was disturbing, like a man was to be killed 30 minutes from the current time in an apartment in Aoyama, his body shredded by a large carnivorous beast, an explosion near Aoyama cemetery, and a massive blackout that's going to affect the whole Tokyo Metropolitan area. It bothered all of us, especially Yuzu. She dismisses it as a prank but Atsuro says that Naoya may have meant for it to happen and says he's gonna go somewhere he could think to look at the other folders. Yuzu and I decided to leave too to kill some time as Atsuro looks more into the COMP. While walking around Shinjuku, we chanced upon a group of oddly-dressed people calling themselves the Shomonkai. They were preaching something about using the power of the Internet to unite the world and some kind of ordeal. We didn't stick around to hear more. After that we ended up in Omotesando and Yuzu was talking about wanting to fit in with the people here, but something about the email we received earlier still bothered me. I looked at my watch and noticed it was already 4:30 PM, thirty minutes after the murder in Aoyama was supposed to occur. Suddenly, several police cars zoomed down the road, their sirens wailing, all headed towards Aoyama. A sense of dread filled me as I remembered that Naoya lived in an apartment in Aoyama and I rushed over to Naoya's place, Yuzu trailing behind me. We found that his apartment was cordoned off by the police and some onlookers were gossiping that a young man was killed in the apartment. I was on the verge of panicking when suddenly...

"Is that you, Kazuya?", a familiar voice said.

I turned and saw my cousin. "Naoya...!"

"Thank goodness you're safe, Naoya!" Yuzu exclaimed.

"...The email you sent made us worry about you." I said.

"I see...I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you." Naoya said. "...The person who was eaten was a student, like yourselves. He lived next door to me."

"He was eaten!? No way!" Yuzu gasped "Is what the email said really true!? But we got the email before the incident happened so... Kazuya, what does this all mean!?"

"Naoya... That mail, its as if it predicts the future." I mused out.

"Heh... normally you'd think that if I were to send an email like that, I'd be the one who actually caused the incident." Naoya chuckled. "Your unpredictability never ceases to amaze me. You truly are... my cousin."

"I understand why the two of you came here... but, our meeting here is an accident." Naoya continued. "We can't meet like this. Hurry and meet Atsuro immediately. It will all begin soon..." Then Naoya leaves.

We meet up with Atsuro who assuaged Yuzu's fears about what happened earlier. He also figured out that the COMPs we had were always monitoring each other so he can't crack one alone. So we all took out our COMPs and Atsuro started working on them. While waiting for Atsuro to finish, I look up and see someone who looks like Naoya. His handsome face is expressionless, but gives off a cold feeling...

"Okay, done! I'm restarting the COMPs!" Atsuro exclaimed.

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Decryption Confirmed

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Booting Program

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...Condition Green

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DEMON SUMMONING PROGRAM

ready to boot

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Booting DEMON SUMMONING PROGRAM

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Peaceful Days are Over

Let's Survive

...And that's how we summoned our first demons. They came out of the COMPs and we beat them but that first time was a shock and was plenty scary. When we beat them, they formed a contract with us, becoming our allies. Yuzu went into panic after that and demanded that we hand the COMPs over to the police since they're supposed to be the ones fighting these things. I disagreed. If we're going to hand them over to the police, we'll never see them again and we'll lose the only way we could fight these monsters. And Naoya said that we're gonna need these, why would he lie? Then I noticed numbers floating above me and my friends' heads. Most people passing by have a 7 while we had a 1... weird. After that we received an email from Naoya saying to meet someone in Aoyama cemetery that will influence our actions in the future and a system mail about Demon Tamers, because that's who we are now. We decided to head the cemetery rather than feeling scared and stupid, as Yuzu said.

At the cemetery, Yuzu started to be creeped out by the graves and inquired about this "person" Naoya wanted us to meet. Atsuro assured her, saying that Naoya would've said "someone" or "monster" if something other than human was to meet us. Suddenly, an explosion happened just like what the Laplace mail said then a high-level ice demon named Wendigo appeared. We couldn't escape because the exits were suddenly blocked by demons. We would've died right then if not for Amane, the Maiden of the Shomonkai. She took down Wendigo with just one attack and he escaped and Amane gave chase. We defeated the rest of the demons. We just discussing the close call we had when the metropolitan blackout happened just as was predicted. Amane came back and set up a barrier in the cemetery to protect us until the next morning.

By morning, we learned that cell lines were down, the trains of the Yamanote line weren't running, the SDF had barricaded all the train stations because there was a suspected "poisonous gas" leak and we were left with no food, no electricity, and no way out. Not to mention that Naoya informed us of the function of the Death Clock, which is a computation of the amount of days a person is left to live, based on the Laplace mail. Only I, the leader of our group could see it and I was reluctant to tell my friends what the Death Clock says for us. Atsuro figured it out though.

"...Its zero, isn't it?" Atsuro muttered dejectedly. "You said it was 1 yesterday."

"..." I lowered my head.

"H-hey, say something! Oh man... you're telling me that we're going to die today!?" Atsuro nervously exclaimed.

"N-no! I don't want to die!" Yuzu clutched her head in fear.

"Then lets raise the number." I announced brazenly.

"What?" Yuzu said.

"Ooh, I get what you mean, Kazuya!" Atsuro had stars in his eyes. "You mean we could prevent anything bad happening to us through the Laplace mail and by fighting with our demons, right?"

"Urgh, I'd rather we find a way home rather than deal with demons." Yuzu said unhappily, crossing her arms over her chest. "But I'll do what I can to survive!"

I smiled at my friends "Let's go."

From then on we did what we could to survive but we never did anything dishonorable. Fighting using our demons and the skills we cracked from them. Participating in the Devil Auction and fusing demons to make stronger ones. All the while we got stronger and stronger. We prevented our first "deaths" from Wendigo, then others' too. Thats how we met Keisuke, Midori, Haru, Gin, Kaido, Miss Mari, Honda, and Izuna. These people played various roles in guiding us in our days in the lockdown and sometimes allied with us to fight. And sometimes, we fought against them too, but I'm not proud of those times. We learned from Izuna that the lockdown was put up in order to prevent the demons from getting out of Tokyo and it quickly became apparent that we could not escape the lockdown short of exterminating all the demons or breaking out ourselves. Throughout those days, we learned of the existence of entities that are "Kings" among demons called Bels, and after Wendigo, it seemed that our deaths would be at the hands of these monsters. The first Bel we encountered was Beldr at the third day of the lockdown. Before Beldr's awakening we battled demons and demon worshipers, all claiming that Beldr was immortal. But through some hacking (courtesy of Atsuro) and some information wrangling we came to know of Beldr's one weakness: Devil's Fuge, more commonly known as mistletoe. After spending the whole day running around trying to get our hands on the Devil's Fuge, we braced ourselves to face Beldr at Aoyama Cemetery, knowing fully well that we could die there.

...Then all of it began to change.