Beelzebub adventures chapter 14

"Tatsumi! You damn moron! What the fuck were ya thinking? We called you like 20 times! What the hell were you doing? You have no excuse…Oh my…"

"Hi grandma! Hi aunt! I missed ya!" Beel happily greeted.

Shouko and Misaki Oga stood frozen and speechless at the sight of the youngest member of their family and his new appearance.

"Oh my…"

"Seems… the milk they drink in Macao does wonders to kids. Hilda, after all…"

"I'm hungry grandma. I'm tired of milk and croquettes. I wanna try something new to eat." Beel says.

Finally bursting in joy, both women grabbed the toddler and hugged him, almost taking his breath away while squealing in joy. The noise quickly attracted the attention of Youjirou, who stood up from the sofa and headed to the entrance, the weight of his buff physique producing powerful stomps that announced his arrival from afar.

"Ok…ok…what's with all the fuzz? Can't a man take his Sunday nap in pea…Oh my mother's facial hair!? Baby Beel!"

''Could you please…lemme go…pops'' Beel complained under the crushing pressure of three superhumans hugging him with all their might. After a few instants, they finally let him go.

"Jeez…now I get where dad gets his brawn from." Beel said, rubbing his chest under his green shirt.

"Well, at least they welcomed you.'' Oga complained while walking by and lying on the living's couch.

"How is this possible?" Misaki asked.

"Our trip to Macao took an unexpected turn, Mother. We found a doctor, who's an old friend of the family. We told him about Beel, and he said that he had the cure for him, a state of the art hormonal therapy for children with growth problems. Something like that, you know. And here's the result.'' Hilda said, proudly lifting her adopted son on her arms.

"Unbelievable." Shouko surprisingly said.

"I wonder if there's a cure for Tatsumi's mental retardation." Misaki wonders.

"I don't give a shit about your opinion, woman." Oga angrily said.

"And how much did it cost? I don't believe he did it all for free." Youjirou wonders.

"Oh, don't worry about that, Father. My family covered every expense, and the doctor gave us a special discount, anyways." Hilda replied.

"But why didn't you answer our phone calls? Specially you, irresponsible young man!" Shouko asked.

"Ohh, we lost our cellphones in a train station when travelling into China. There's so many people going through there that sometimes that stuff can be really slow. We barely recovered them yesterday.'' Hilda replied, with her ever confident smile.

"You had to see dad when he recovered his. He was desperate. First thing he did was browsing pics of naked girls, or something like that, haha." Beel says.

"Shut up you lying rascal!" Oga angrily yelled.

"Tatsumi, you damn closet pervert! How can you do that near your kid!'' Misaki was all over him, trying to strangle him, while he, unlike previous occasions, restrained her wrists before she could grab a hold of him.

"Don't worry, Misaki, I already gave him his deserved punishment. Now, can I see my little girl?" Hilda asked, looking around.

"Ohh, she was right there on that mat in front of the sofa. I wonder where she got herself into…'' Shouko wonders.

"Yeehaaa!" Beel happily shouted.

Youjirou, carrying both Beel and Nico over his broader than ever back, performed his sliding grovel from one side of the room to the other. The older kid, taking his little sister in his arms, enjoyed himself and screamed in excitement. Stopping near Shouko and Hilda, the middle aged man shed tears of joy.

"Finally, after many years, someone cares about my sliding grovel! It's as if Oga and Misaki were kids again! Shouko, can we have a special dinner to celebrate?" Yojirou happily asked.

"If you and Tatsumi clean the dishes, of course, honey." Shouko happily replied, getting ready to cook.

While everyone chatted in the living room, Oga stood from the couch and headed to his room. He entered his room and lay down on his bed, crossing his arms behind his nape, and started to do something no one else believed he did, thinking. Living his inner life, he might have been stupid, but not as much as people thought. He was easily distracted and got lost in his thoughts way more frequently than anyone could imagine. Sometimes he would get into what seemed to be a trance or an alternate state of mind. Was it actually a mental illness? He didn't really care.

It had been the fifteen longest days of his eighteen years of life. Granted, many crazy and larger than life events had taken place in the last five years since he found the green haired baby on that stream. The last weeks, however, were arguably the most intense. And terrifying.

Never before had he felt as useless, weak, and defenseless as in this adventure. Never before was he as close to dying, not even when fighting Fuji and Satan. In that occasion, he at least had the chance of calling for backup and fight back. On this one, not even the presence of Beel or Hilda could do much. Their new, invisible enemies had toyed with him and his friends as if they were gods pulling the strings of his mortal body, mind and soul, taking him to the very edge without landing a single punch or energy blast on him. He was slowly resembling real world generals more and more: letting the special forces and foot soldiers to do the heavy lifting and tanking the shots.

"The hell I'm saying? I took the hardest shots without being able to shoot back….or did I?" Oga said to himself.

He and Beel had tracked and found Kunieda. He delivered the final energy boost that activated her King's Crest and woke her from the demonic trance placed on her and ultimately led her to save him, herself, and everyone else. That, however, was not his style.

His male ego was not really hurt by the fact that he had been saved by a girl he once had to save before. Misaki and his mother had taught him since his earliest years how strong women could be. But he still hated to be treated like a disabled weakling, he hated not being able to jump into the bloodiest spot of the melee. As the king without a crown of Ishiyama, hated not being able to march in front of his troops to fight death face to face. This enemy didn't have a face, not even after Kunieda tried to describe the demon she fought after he got unconscious. This new type of enemy fought without even being there and used a trickery he despised and admired in equal measure in Himekawa, the way of the mob leaders. The way the Yakuza controlled his society in many ways he had heard in rumors and seen in fiction. A kind of fighting he, as a street thug, could not expect to defeat alone with his fists, as mighty as he was.

Despite not being an intelligence prodigy, even he knew he had not only to become more powerful, but to change his approach and style if he wanted to survive the new decade of his life as the adopted father of the demon prince and princess and if he wanted his gang to make it along him. The string of fear he still felt to a degree had to go away soon. He started to get it out of his mind while he stood up and walked to the window, breathing deeply after opening it. As he always did before facing another unknown situation, he closed his eyes. He took the images of terror inside his head and froze them in a still image. He would later take them and shrink them, as if they were the images inside those old TV screens he had watched on his grandfather's house. He shrank it until it completely disappeared from his sight, being replaced by another screen. One in which the all white demon lied on the floor at his feet. One in which his friends surrounded it's body. One in which he later looked up to the blue sky and walked away, followed by his gang. Unexpectedly, his subconscious started to take control without him realizing. The next scene, as the screen got to it's max size, featured Kunieda, in her Queen of Ishiyama attire, young Beel as a baby again hanging on her back and staring at him. He approached her and grabbed her by the shoulders, her face shining in radiant joy, her lips tainted in red lipstick, her blue eyes more bright than ever staring at him. Before he drew her close to his chest, he interrupted his thoughts.

"What the hell? Why am I thinking about this kind of thing?" Oga thinks to himself.

He returned to his bed and sit on the border of the bed, his legs over the footboard. Another way in which the last days had been more intense than ever before, was on his feelings. Never before had he felt as much anguish and sadness over people as on that day. The prospect of losing the young and weak Beel, who was trying to save him (instead of vice versa) was something that made him shed his first tears and sobs in a long time, while Hilda and Furuichi slept in the hospital room.

The fear of losing Kunieda was up there along with it, but he felt it differently. He felt anguish when he saw Misaki coming back home injured after a big gang fight, when he was still a kid. He felt the same when Hilda was kidnapped by the Demon Pillars. The fear he felt for Kunieda on those days was on a different level.

It was not just fear and anguish. It was also a deep sadness that pierced him so deep he could feel the pain in his chest. There was something that came along with it, something that could not be separated from it. More primal. Frustration. The kind he felt most of the time around members of the opposite sex, but had learned to repress and ignore over the years until it rarely ever bothered him. The events in his dreams and everything that finally concluded in the stage of that Opera Hall, however, had torn down the protective walls he had built so carefully inside his mind. His inner self was exposed for her to see, and she, despite possessed, was not wrong when she said he was a caged lion struggling to escape. He avoided being broken, however, and was able to win in the last second. A part of him regretted that decision.

He had felt similar things since he was on elementary school. Select special female protagonists from Shonen Jump, some cousins, comic super heroines, women in his father's magazines and some female classmates started that spark inside of him. A weird feeling he could not understand, one that bothered him but also made him feel happy. He soon found out that it was a good motivation (at least partially) to unleash all his sadism whenever any foolish male of his age (and even older) dared to trade blows with him. He was not an idiot, despite whatever anyone could say about him. He still could not explain it, but there were times in his everyday life he got completely lost in his thoughts, normally about cartoons or manga. The world around him lost importance, and soon people started to mock his lack of attention to the most simple details of his surroundings. Things eventually got physical. Where a weak boy would have been taken advantage off, he was lucky enough to have been born naturally strong and aggressive to answer any attack.

Soon enough, he found out the passion of his life, beating folks to a pulp and enjoying the adrenaline rush of combat. That scared away almost every girl from him, except maybe a few exceptions that either were too shy or too immature to admit they wanted to hang around with him. He could feel their conflicted emotions. When realizing why they avoided him, that in turn only angered him more and made it easier for him to build and show his ice man façade when being around them. For most of the next eight years of school, the only female friend (or the most similar to such a thing) he would ever had was his sister, to whom he would sometimes ask why everyone seemed to avoid him. Whenever she asked him if he had ''someone special'' he asked why would someone be that special to him. She would in turn ask if he ever felt butterflies in his stomach when close to any girl and explained him the concept of infatuation in words he could understand.

"So, if you never had a boyfriend. Why do you ask me this, you dumb sis?" Oga asked, smirking at the newly found knowledge.

"Because men don't know how to treat women and they don't deserve me, you damn rascal! Neither do you, that's why you're alone!" Misaki would say while holding him in a rear headlock and giving while cuffing him in the head. Only an hour later, however, they would be laughing again, to later fight after she started it (as almost always).

The years went on. He hit puberty and started to match his father in height. His inner world, on the other hand, got messier. His increasing strength made him even more dangerous and difficult to control on the streets and in the school, though he could not recall a single time when he started a fight. His arguments and fights with his mother and sister soon started to increase in hostility and frequency, sometimes because of his fault, but many other times because of things he had not done, with him rarely ever being the one starting to raise his voice or getting physical. His mother and sister would start to pour their daily frustrations on him, as if blaming him of their failures. Soon enough, his father had to intervene on a regular basis, showing him whom he had inherited his strength from after he pushed Misaki all across the backyard, crushing her against the bottom wall and hit her a couple times on the stomach. The pain of his father's knuckles and fingers on his face discouraged him from any further attempt of paying back any further blow from any woman in the house. The resentment, however, would never go away.

"You act all so tough and throw hands at pleasure, yet whenever we dare to make you taste your own medicine, you squeal and call us ''faggots'' or ''abusers''? Give me a fucking break."

The brotherly and motherly love however, would never disappear. With time, every fire would eventually be extinguished and things would go back to normal. Laughter, chats, hugs and kisses would come back from their behalf. Oga would not return them back. He was 14 years old by the time he decided to repay his sister with a taste of her own philosophy, deciding women were not worthy of him. Whenever he was asked about crushes, or lectured about sex or future marriage, Oga would play his poker face and become the iceman he trained so hard to be, pretending to listen but never answering clearly. As time passed, the hints were enough for Misaki to understand his motivations. After realizing the futility and hypocrisy of trying to argue with him, she gave up and came to an unspoken agreement with him, one that improved their relationship a bit. She would never ever again bring around the subject and would even try to convince his parents to cut their lectures and blaming. He would still have to endure her temper tantrums and play along with her attacks, faking pain in order to avoid escalations, while being thankful he had got much tougher over the years.

Two more years passed. He came to enjoy more than ever his passion for street and school brawls, using his natural ability to remain calm under the most extreme pressure and focus his energies to also sweep whatever feelings of frustration he had towards women, who rarely ever appeared in the correctional schools he attended. Getting into trouble indirectly with Furuichi, saving him, then later being there to listen to all of his chat about his frustration, lechery and getting to see his pornographic and erotic material became enough for him to get the needed pleasure to feel superior on his despise to anything related to sexuality and romance.

Then Aoi and Hilda arrived to his life.

Never in his craziest dreams could he imagine that a bombshell with her baby would start living with him and sleep in his own room, faking being his wife in front of his family. Never did he imagine that a badass and beautiful shonen action girl like Kunieda would become a tsundere…because of him, turning him into the anime protagonist he wanted to be for so long. And no male shonen protagonist could exist without HIS harem? His wildest and deepest fantasies, the ones he had been repressed for so long, had become more than real. At first, he did whatever he could to ignore it. However, when he had his first demonic induced hallucination because of Beel, he would surrender to the undeniable fact when seeing the hilarious image of both girls, turned into trains with human faces, racing towards his heart. His brain was telling him what he didn't want to admit.

Time passed. Incredible adventures took place. He became more powerful than ever…and those two were always by his side, giving him and energy and inner motivation he tried to ignore or embrace depending on the moment and his mood. Despite liking Hilda a lot, and being with her most of the time, she reminded him too much of the negative traits of his mother and sister. Kunieda, while also having a strong character, was more balanced, showing most of the positive side.

Beel's arrival and the sudden duty of park debut had weakened him and make him to lower his guard, he thought. Thanks to Beel, for the first time in years he could show a less violent side, one that would not scare or turn girls hostile towards him. When Hilda started to give him cues of what she felt towards him, and Hebisaki Ayako chased him everywhere he went…he felt he could fly all the way to the sun screaming to the top of his lungs. After more time passed, their friendship grew deeper and Kunieda subtlety declared her feelings to him in that street spar two years ago, he was about to give up and finally let the iceman die and fulfill the fate of every shonen guy. As always, however, his other side prevailed.

No, not yet at least. He still had some things to do. They still had to improve certain things in themselves…was it? The near death experience and almost getting too intimate with Kunieda in that Opera stage had taken to his limit. He started to rebuild the walls as soon as he could. It was too soon to get to that arc of the manga. There was some missing chapters he had to understand better before continuing.

Oga laughed to himself. Before he could lose himself into his thinking trance again, his cellphone rang. The one who dared to bother him? Tojo Hidetora.

"What's up, kitty?" Oga greeted.

"Hey, bitch, how are you? Are you doing anything on Monday?" Tojo asked.

"I don't think so, why?" Oga asked.

"I have a ten day vacation and I want to take you and everyone else camping." Tojo replied.

"Sounds like a great plan. Did you ask the others?" Oga wonders.

"I talked to Furuichi, Kanzaki, Himekawa about it and they said they'll go. Can you ask Kunieda? I erased her contact by mistake, and don't have the contact of any of her friends. She can ask the same to them. I need to know how many people so I can rent us a bus." Tojo said.

"Sure, I'll ask Kunieda." Oga answered.

"Thanks. Just bring outside clothes, swimming clothes, and other supplies. We're not just going camping. There's a lot of good shit I'm planning for you." Tojo said.

"Ok then, talk to you later." Oga said, hanging up his phone.

Oga leaned over his window, a sudden rush of excitement making him laugh like a maniac, a sight he ensured no one got to see.

"Camping, huh? This summer vacation won't be a pain in the ass after all."