I don't own Highschool DXD! Only OC's and all the bullshit I come up with!
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This is NOT a rewrite of the original story I posted, this is a full-on rework because I believe I made multiple mistakes and weird narrative choices that clashed with the later parts of the story I had envisioned, so I'm restarting from the ground up, this story is born from the original's ashes.
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When Flames Rise – Chapter 1
A Spark from the Ashes
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Parents.
People you can rely on. People that love you unconditionally. People that will take care of you no matter what. They love you. You love them. They support you in every way possible and raise you to be a member of society
That's what they were supposed to be.
But this wasn't always the case. Sometimes parents abandoned their children, sometimes because they have no other option, sometimes just because they don't want their children.
Others hurt their children in different ways. From being physically violent towards them to just never giving them the feeling of being loved.
And of course, sometimes there were parents like those of Issei Hyoudou.
His biological father he had never even seen, only heard of from his mother's rants about what a horrible man he was for abandoning her.
And while it was bad enough for him to be fatherless, that was just the tip of the iceberg. The true terror of his life was his mother.
She hated him, despised him, for he reminded her. Reminded her of what had been done to her by not only Issei's but also her father.
His messy chocolate-brown hair perfectly mirrored that of his father, making his mother see the man in Issei every time the boy was in her sight.
His brownish hazel eyes had a piercing look, that brought up memories in his mother of the horrible things her father did to her.
Personally, the man never laid a finger on her. But that was more from disgust than anything else. She was no person to him, only a way to make money. He made people pay to touch her and she didn't have as much as a say in it.
At the age of 19, she finally escaped his grasp and fled to Kuoh and while it wouldn't have been hard for her father to get her back, he had other more efficient ways to make money and would rather not waste his money on a search for something he didn't need anymore.
After some time on the streets of Kuoh, she met a man. A man who seemed to care for her. A man she fell in love with. A man who would betray her.
This man was Issei's biological father and at first, it seemed that he was truly in love with Issei's mother. He helped her get a job and together they bought a house in Kuoh.
But after she got pregnant with Issei, he just straight up disappeared.
His phone. Destroyed. His Bank Account. Never to be used again. Any information about him. Wiped away from the face of the earth. The police gave up the case before long as they weren't able to find enough information on the man to conclude where he might have disappeared to.
The emotional stress this put on her was enough to make her buy medicine for herself, but as she took it almost daily, the taste slowly grew on her and soon a need for the pills had developed in her. She became addicted and the medicine turned into a drug.
At that time Issei was still a baby and his mother had nothing but love for him. But as he grew older his facial features slowly but surely started resembling her and his father more and more. Until the day she could see both of them in his face.
All the anger, all the sorrow, all the pain she had endured from both of them. All of that she let loose on Issei, who didn't know what was happening. He could do nothing but hide from his mother and do his best to not aggravate her. But whatever he did he'd still get punished out of nowhere and still had to endure her sudden fits of rage when her memories resurfaced.
However, Issei never got to a point where he would give up on himself. Even though he was in a situation where most would at least consider suicide, he did not let his mind slip into such dark thoughts. He fought off the urge to let go and forced himself to move on. His determination to survive was unmatched.
But keeping up said determination would become harder as a man stepped into his life.
A man whose mere presence sends shivers down the young boy's spine. A man whose smile hid the many sins he had committed so perfectly that when it broke, his entire aura changed, from friendly neighbor to heartless murderer. And man that had so much blood on his hands, it was a wonder that they hadn't turned red yet.
A man that developed an interest in Issei.
He had expected to be ignored by the man because Issei was not the original reason why the man had come to their house. The reason he was here was to make a deal with his mother, so he'd supply her with more medicine that the pharmacy had stopped giving her.
The first time he had come by, he seemed rather apathetic and uninterested, barely listening to her, and commanding her around with not a care in the world. But then his dark red eyes fell on Issei and something about him changed.
Something that made him a thousand times scarier.
From a typical gangster who had no features that made him stand out much from the crowd, he turned into something much more sinister. His bored expression lightened up in joy and standing where the simple man had, was now a monster that wanted something from Issei.
Issei was almost paralyzed by the fear.
A part of him wanted to fall for this façade, wanted to accept that he was being manipulated and just live in this false reality this man was trying to build around them.
But the rest of Issei looked past the mask and could feel the dark intentions behind that false smile.
Maybe he would have tried fleeing from the man, but that idea was proven worthless once he found out who this man exactly was.
Kuoh wasn't known for being a peaceful city.
The police force was tiny and corrupted, everyone in the governing body had deep connections with at least one of the dark networks of the city.
And this man, that had taken a great interest in him, was one of the most powerful men this city had.
He had eyes and ears all around the city, politics in his left and a gun in his right hand. He could make him disappear from the face of the earth with a single phone call. And even if Issei managed to somehow leave Kuoh through the forest on its border he would just be labeled a missing child by the Kuoh police force and in a matter of days, he'd be right back here in the man's hands.
Informing the police about the man would backfire in every way possible and trying to get bigger forces into play was impossible seeing how Issei was but a mere child with no connections.
There was nothing he could do but cooperate and endure.
With his mother not even having a say in the matter, he was relocated into a hotel in the center of Kuoh that served more as the headquarters of the gang than anything else. Surprisingly enough he was given a room on his own, which was simple but already marginally better than his prior living conditions with his mother.
Though that positive aspect was quickly overshadowed by something way worse.
It happened a week after his arrival.
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It had been the probably best week of his life.
No beatings. No screaming. No struggle.
There had been no one to replace the role of tormentor that his mother had played for such a long time in his life.
It felt weird for no one to take over that role.
He had gotten used to the constant adrenaline in his veins, always anticipating a sudden punishment for one or another reason, but now. Now nothing happened at all.
He didn't dare to exit his room, fearing the mass of people he saw when coming here. He knew none of them and yet he knew all of them were capable of tearing him apart in mere seconds if needed or in the worst of scenarios they'd take their sweet time.
So he stayed, sitting on his bed, and letting the time pass his mind wandering off into nothingness, waiting for something to happen, something to change.
But the only event he could expect was the man that had brought him here appearing. He always took a plate of food that differed depending on the time of day. The food was obviously for Issei and even though he didn't put the tiniest bit of trust into the man, he saw himself eat the food every time without even trying to put up a fight.
Just the fact that the man would sit down opposite of the plate of food and stare him down until Issei had eaten the food that had been brought was enough for the boy to hurry. It was as if the man just didn't care how long it would take Issei to finish his plate, he would always wait for him to finish. Issei didn't know how long the man was willing to wait, but he didn't dare test him, out of fear and because Issei could not bear the man's stare for longer than necessary.
During the meal, no words would be exchanged between them, and Issei would start to question how the man was able to spend so much time watching him even though he probably had tons of things way more urgent to do. Apparently, that was not the case, as the man would never show any signs of getting stressed or growing impatient with Issei. It perplexed Issei, but there was no purpose in questioning it, so Issei quickly grew to accept it as a fact.
This pattern repeated itself over the entire week, three times a day, and Issei had already gotten used to the man coming into his room unannounced.
Then the circle was broken on the seventh day.
"Issei, I need you to do something."
Issei froze, his mind took a bit to fully register the words, but before that his head tilted backward, causing his eyes to meet with those of the man's.
Regret filled him.
The red orbs demanded his focus making the world around them almost blurry and unrecognizable. He could not draw back from the eye contact as raging insanity was awakened in his mind and fueled by the two poisonous red lights that were burning their image into his memory.
"Please come with me."
Issei almost fell out of his chair when the man turned, facing away from him. The sudden shift back to normality was just too much for his brain to handle and he remained seated until he had fully recovered.
Before he had always avoided looking the man directly in the eyes. He had not anticipated such a haunting image, but his instincts had warned him from making eye contact.
Issei wasn't sure how long he sat in that chair, before being ready to stand back up on both his feet.
But even so the man seemingly just waited for him, not caring that Issei potentially could have been on that chair for half an eternity.
Once Issei got up the man casually moved to the door which, like everything else he did, made a shiver of fright run down Issei's spine. After he reached it, his gaze returned to Issei, the smile still ever-present on his face. Issei, in fear of dissatisfying the man immediately, went after him avoiding eye-contact all together.
The door was opened and Issei saw the corridor he had been escorted through when he had arrived here. Just there was a massive difference from before.
No one was there.
The hall seemingly just stretched on and on into either direction with not a single person other than the two of them being present. At first, the silence gave him comfort, but soon he felt the paranoia gripping him. The hallway had been crowded, full of people running around, keeping up a constant stream of conversations that formed into loud chattering that had only quieted down when he arrived in his room. But now. Now the silence was suffocating. The only sound Issei could make out was his rising heartbeat.
The feeling of dread washed over him with every step as he felt his breath getting heavier, yet he could not hear it, only his heartbeat as it got louder and louder with each thump threatening to deafen him.
He looked at their surroundings trying to find something to distract himself from his heartbeat that was slowly driving him mad, but he found himself in a completely different corridor than before.
The soft carpet floor had turned into pure concrete, the clean walls that stretched out between the numbered doors were two rows of wooden doors, so close to one another that the concrete between them was little more than enough for a wall to have space between each of the rooms behind the doors that needed to be barely large enough for even a single person to fit so tightly next to one another. The only illumination came from some dim lights on the ceiling that were far enough apart that between them there was always a small space where almost no light reached the floor.
And then he heard once more.
He heard people crying, screaming, kicking, struggling. And as if on queue he saw that some of the wooden doors were shaking. Shaking from the people behind them pleading, demanding, wanting freedom, but they were ignored, the man still walking and Issei still following.
Issei wished his heartbeat would once again deafen him and spare him from all those horrible sounds that collided with his thoughts creating brutal images of what was had happened to the people behind those doors to make them act like that.
The man stopped abruptly capturing Issei's attention and getting his mind off those dark thoughts.
Issei had his sight fixed on the man's simple shoes, trying his hardest to resist looking up to the towering figure that had seized movement a moment ago.
But in the end, his curiosity got the better of him and his eyes flickered upwards.
The feeling of utter regret was instant.
The red orbs were staring down at him, taking up his entire attention, canceling out anything else around them.
His mind was on fire, the flames just growing with the pressure that acted as fuel. Every second it felt like he was about to slip and fall into the endless pit of insanity, but he fought against it, not allowing himself to lose himself.
Yet, even with the chaos that was raging in his mind, he could make out a difference in the man's eyes.
Expectance.
The man was expecting something from him, but he could not come up with anything logical that the man could be expecting from him.
Without breaking eye contact the man opened a door beside the two, the motion wasn't even noticed by Issei, he barely even heard the loud creaking sound of the rusty hinges.
Right after, Issei was released from the man's gaze and stumbled back a bit, almost falling over.
This time it took him only a few seconds to come back to reality, but as he did so he noticed the open door beside them.
Gazing into the darkness he couldn't make anything out inside the room, his mind still recovering. His eyes though were quick to accustom to the darkness present and soon he saw a silhouette in the darkness, the silhouette of a man on a chair.
With every second details on the man became clearer and soon his mind was plagued by yet another image he regrated ever seeing.
The man's eyes and mouth were both shut close due to pieces of cloth that were wrapped around his head. His fingers were completely pale, with no blood in them, due to cables that have been tightly strapped around each wrist. Then he saw the nails in the man's hand, that combined with the cables made it impossible for the man to move his arms away from the wooden arm-wrests. He wore no shirt, which revealed that he had a well-defined figure that was littered with scars, cuts, and bruises with some more recent than others. The man's legs were held onto the chair more humanly, a simple rope being the only thing holding them in place.
He heard a metal click right beside himself and his eyes slowly wandered to his left, where he was met with the sight of a gun. It was held by the man's hand, whose fingers held the barrel rather lightly with the grip being the closest thing to Issei.
"Take it."
The voice was a whisper as soft as always, but this time the darkness behind that soft façade was way clearer than ever before.
Issei didn't understand. Not the command, that had been clear enough, but why. Why would the man want him to take a gun? Why right now? Why right here?
And then, he realized.
Slowly his eyes wandered back to the man who was seated in the room, he was breathing heavily recognizable by the rising and falling exposed chest. And there, right on his chest, all those cuts formed letters.
DEAD
MEAT
He was supposed to murder this man.
But why? Why him? Why here? Why now?
Why was the man giving him a gun?
Why was he supposed to pull the trigger?
Why was he the one to kill the man?
Issei didn't understand, he couldn't understand. It just didn't make sense to him. His brain could not find a good explanation as to why he was chosen to be the one to murder this man.
A hand was placed on his shoulder.
Issei froze, yet his entire body was shaking in fear. The man's hand didn't feel like just a hand. It felt so much worse.
It felt like thousands of needles were stabbed into him, into his skin, into his flesh, into his mind, into his soul, into his very being and he could do nothing about it.
"Take it."
This time there was no façade. There was no holding back the dark poison that dripped from the words. The mask that hid it was completely removed.
And his right arm moved.
It was not him who made his arm slowly move to grab the gun. He did nothing, absolutely nothing. He couldn't fight back, only being able to watch as his arm, didn't shake in fear, didn't waiver in its movement, and didn't reply to his command to stop. It just kept on moving until the fingers reached the gun and slowly coiled around the grip.
The man released the barrel of the gun leaving it completely in Issei's grasp, but the boy was too shocked to even think about that, he only felt the man's hand on his shoulder and his arm gripping the gun.
"Take Aim."
The words had come out as a whisper almost fading before they reached Issei's ear, and again, his arm was out of his control with it following the command the second it was dictated.
Issei's vision got blurry from the tears that flooded his eyes, he was about to shoot somebody. Right here and now, with no control at all, just standing there, paralyzed as his arms followed commands that were not his own.
He wanted to look away or close his eyes as the gun pointed at the sitting man's head.
A slight breeze brushed past his left ear, he at first dismissed it, but soon realized that it was not just a mere breeze, it was breathing, breathing from the monster that was making him do all this.
His head slowly turned towards the breathing, his eyes every so often snapping back to the man on the chair. Once more he established eye contact with the monster, but this time the monster's eyes were full of mad joy. The mad joy that made them shine just that little bit more. The mad joy that pushed Issei back into a spiral of insanity. He wanted to throw up, feeling the madness, but his stomach felt hollowed out, almost nonexistent.
He felt tiny, like an ant facing a behemoth, that had spotted it. There was nothing he could do, not run not hide, he was in the giant's sight and that giant had plans for him.
"Do it."
There was a loud bang.
Followed by silence.
Absolute silence.
The ambient sounds of the corridor had gone completely quiet.
His head slowly turned.
There.
A hole.
Blood.
Running out the hole.
The hole in the head.
The head of the man.
The man he had killed.
The bullet had hit its target straight in the left eye, ripping the cloth that worked as a blindfold apart and revealing the victim's right eye, which was staring at the floor without any kind of focus. His entire body had slumped, the muscles relaxed, and any kind of movement had seized. The blood was flowing down his face, past and over his lips dripping onto the wounded chest before tainting his pants.
Issei could do little more than stare at the dead man.
He barely noticed how his gaze shifted to his right arm. His hand with the gun in it. His index finger was still pressing down on the trigger.
Blood was on his hands.
"Give it back."
Immediately the arm moved to the side, next to Issei's head where the man's left hand was waiting for it. After Issei was disarmed, the man let go of his shoulder and Issei's arm slumped down to his side, losing all the stiffness it had before.
But Issei didn't notice, nor would he care, his mind was somewhere else.
He hadn't known the dead man, hadn't known of him. He didn't know why the man was here, nor did he know what he did to get himself in this situation. And he didn't know why he was chosen to murder the man.
What he knew was that he had murdered the man.
It had been his hand that pulled the trigger and taken the life.
He was guilty.
But he refused to believe that.
The crime was done by his hand, but he was not the one in command.
He did not commit to the crime.
He was not the one that decided that the man would die.
He was not the murderer.
He was the gun.
The tool that was used to commit the murder
He was not guilty.
That he did believe.
That he told himself.
But something was wrong.
A part of him appeared.
A part he didn't know existed until now.
That part wanted to smile.
That part wanted to take the gun back, open the next door and do it again.
And then do it again
And then again
And then again
And again
And again
And again
And again
AND AGAIN
AND AGAIN
NO!
No, he didn't want that.
He didn't know what had just come over him, but it scared him.
It scared him that there was a side to him he could not control.
A side that had emerged out of nowhere.
"Follow me."
Before Issei was even able to fully take in what had happened, the man spoke and Issei turned towards him. The man was already walking down the corridor the way they came from and without hesitating, Issei followed. In contrast to his arm though he wasn't sure if the man had once more commanded his body or if he had just reacted by himself to the man's command.
The distant sound of screaming brought Issei to realize that the corridor around them had gone completely silent. Only a dozen doors away from where he had spilled blood, there was silent crying and whimpering, barely audible from behind the wooden doors and the further the two walked from the man's corpse, the louder the screaming and struggling became, resuming its previous volume once they reached a point from where none of the prisoners had heard the gunshot.
Like before Issei's heartbeat started overlapping over all other sounds and he soon couldn't see his surroundings. It was like everything went out of focus before it suddenly crashed back down into clarity, just this time instead of the barely lit corridor full of prisoners he was back in the hotel's hallway.
If it weren't for Issei's current state of mind, he would probably have questioned how something like that was even possible.
But as of now, Issei was indifferent to the unnatural phenomena, he was too preoccupied with trying to suppress his darker desires. His dark side. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing yourself in the reflection just with a dark smile and eyes full of murderous intent. It was still you, but at the same time, it wasn't at all you.
Or was it?
Yes, it was his reflection that showed all the murderous intent, but what he saw in the mirror was not what he felt. He didn't have a joyful smile spread across his lips. He didn't have that mad spark of murder in his eyes.
Yet it was a part of him.
A part that didn't fit into the rest of his being, but that somehow had made its existence very clear and its desires even more so. But he wouldn't let himself fall into that gapping darkness, he moved forward, away from it. But he could not run from himself, thus it followed, ready to swallow him whole if he were to fall.
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Avoiding the fall into darkness at first wasn't even a challenge, to begin with. It was something Issei did unconsciously, and he doubted he would fall into it even if he tried.
Something special about the darkness was that normally it wasn't as big as it first seemed. It was tiny, a small island in the middle of the ocean. He barely felt its effects at all, even when trying to focus on it.
But all of that changed once the man was close.
He felt it flare up and grow gigantic, making him question if he could even compare to it. His thoughts would be invaded by dark sinister desires, that demanded him to do horrible things.
And it grew.
Because that man on the chair was not the only one destined to die through Issei's hand. After all, there were hundreds if not thousands of people behind all of those wooden doors.
And every time the trigger was pulled.
Every time a head exploded from the impact of a bullet.
Every time Issei would kill.
It grew.
His control slipped more and more and soon he felt himself aiming at the victims before he was told to do so.
After a few dozen more murders he felt a twisted excitement build up inside of him when seeing who he was going to murder next.
After what were probably hundreds, he had a hard time stopping his hand from pulling the trigger before the command was given.
The hallway full of rattling doors turned quieter with every time he visited, fewer and fewer people being there for him to murder.
With every day his fight for control with the darkness grew harder.
But he didn't give up, no matter how much the odds would go against him, he would continue fighting.
Even with no visible end to the circle.
But then.
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They went down the hallway, the only sound coming from their steps on the cold concrete.
Issei's right hand was twitching in excitement, wanting to finally murder again after a week of not even a single kill.
It had been years since the first time Issei held that cursed gun in his hands, yet he still remembered it vividly. Since then he had grown taller and surprisingly a slight bit more muscular, even though he didn't perform any kind of exercise when he was alone in his room.
The most notable change were black veins that had started forming under his skin on his shoulder and had traveled down his entire right arm and up to his face, almost reaching his right eye. It was a detail easily missed at the first glance, only really sticking out once one noticed them.
His eyes were darting from door to door, the right one being filled with an almost primal hunger while the left one just followed the notion, almost lifeless.
By now the darkness could take control of his right arm and right eye and with the man around Issei couldn't even stop it from doing so.
It was frustrating, but no matter what he tried, it wouldn't stop getting stronger and in the face of his despair, it just seemed to gain strength. So he stopped displaying those negative emotions in an attempt to stop it from growing.
That somewhat worked, but the side effect was that he seemed like a shell of a former person, though what he was before was not much different than what he was now, due to his younger self having hardened up rather fast due to how he was treated by his mother.
"I have high hopes."
Issei looked up at the man, still being a full head smaller than him, with a curiosity he hadn't felt in a long time. The last time he had heard the man's voice was before the darkness had performed each kill without needing any command, already knowing why Issei was here. Something else ticked Issei off that the man had not turned his head towards Issei. Normally he would constantly keep eye contact with Issei while talking, but now he only saw the back of his head sitting atop his somewhat wide shoulders.
But Issei didn't have much time to question the man's unusual behavior as something else caught his attention, something that shook his world-image.
Every time they were in this hallway, it would go into the distance with no end, seemingly stretching into infinity.
But there, a few meters in front of them, the hallway ended with one last door. The last door from which one could hear somebody struggle. Metal chains rattling. An uneven breathing pattern. Muffled screams of terror.
This was it.
The last person he had to murder.
The last time he had to spill blood.
The last time he would be here.
All of those thoughts should have made Issei cry in happiness, but he didn't.
His sense of happiness was lost with the abandonment of his emotions.
His humanity was nothing more than a distant voice in the back of his head.
Then the door opened.
And he saw someone he thought would be forever out of his life.
His mother.
Her arms and feet held up by chains on the ceiling and floor, holding her against a wall full of dull spikes that had by now caused a big puddle of dried-up blood under her feet. Cuts and bruises were all over her body, leaving her a beaten mess. Only her face was untouched, with a piece of cloth stopping her from screaming, but with her eyes uncovered.
Their eyes met and he could see a spark of hope in hers that quickly faded once she saw the utter hatred in one of his eyes and the murderous intent in his other one.
Issei didn't notice his right arm bulging as the black veins seemingly exploded inside of it, coloring it black and making it bulge and grow slightly in size, turning the fingers into sharp claws and building dense muscles with their only purpose being to move the clawed hands as fast as possible.
A massive wing abruptly tore through his shirt hitting the wall of the small room, making it crack under the powerful appendage. It looked like something you'd expect to see on a dinosaur capable of flight, yet the latex-like texture of the darkness made it look more like rubber than anything organic.
His face also wasn't spared from the sudden transformation, as his right side turned completely dark with no real features left other than his mouth and eye that turned into a white empty orb. The mouth split into a smile and revealed its much larger size and sharp teeth seemingly capable of ripping flesh into mere shreds.
But the most disturbing part was that the other half of his face had also a big dark smile spread across it.
It wasn't that Issei had let go and allowed the darkness to take over, it was just that for the first time both their desires aligned.
His hate had manifested through the darkness and had formed him into this weird abomination that was standing in the room between the man and his mother.
But he could not care less.
All he could think of was killing his former torturer and so.
He moved.
For one moment his mother saw the monster that once resembled her son stand in the doorframe of her small prison and the next her entire body was smashed against the spike wall, crushing her bones. Before she could even fully react to the pain, claws ripped through her head, tearing the skull apart as if it was nothing more than paper, and not a moment later it was followed by another swipe and another and another and another.
She wasn't alive for long, but the few moments before her death were absolute hell. She suffered immensely but death took her fast, the claw-swipes from Issei's right hand having done enough lethal damage for her to pass away moments after the first strike had hit.
Issei observed the wall full of splattered blood, with his mother's mutilated corpse still hanging there.
He was not satisfied.
It had been barely enough to do anything against the mountain of hate that had been building up inside of him for all those years.
He needed more
More
More
MORE
He turned.
His eyes crossed with those of the man, who calmly watched him as if he hadn't just ripped his mother into shreds like a wild animal.
Like always the eyes demanded his attention, but this time his rage pushed their hypnotic power away and he leaped at the man with no hesitation
His intentions were clear.
"Stop."
Issei barely picked up on the whispered word but found himself completely frozen unable to move at all. His claws were mere centimeters from the man's face, and he was more than willing to just rip him apart just then and there.
But he couldn't.
Not a single one of his muscles responded to his command, even his eyes were frozen in place not able to look anywhere but the man's peaceful face.
"You can't hurt me."
The statement just doubled Issei's rage, he had found himself with power, with might and before he could punish his tormentor he was turned into a puppet with no will.
"Now Kneel."
Issei felt his knees bend and get into position.
But he wouldn't let them.
His arms moved to touch the ground and rest on one of his knees.
But he wouldn't let them.
His upper body bends down to complete the kneeling position.
But he wouldn't let them.
There was a spark.
The room was hit with something akin to a shockwave, there was no wind, nor any kind of energy that pushed the dust along the floor.
A fire lit up in the darkness.
It was more like reality itself was bent away from Issei.
The fire spread.
Making him a potent point of focus.
Consuming everything in its path.
A spot that stood out from its surroundings.
Nothing would stop it.
Something that could not be overlooked.
Nothing could stop it.
Issei got back into a standing position.
His right eyes had both changed into a glowing goldish tone that radiated power as it seemingly burned behind his Iris.
He looked at the man with an unrivaled determination. A determination to rip him to shreds and eradicate his very being from the face of this planet.
The man, in heavy contrast, was barely fazed by Issei's newly acquired power that let him stand up for himself. He gave off a feeling of disapproval instead of the expected fear or even anger at seeing Issei do something so unnatural.
"I expected you to be more obedient. That seems to leave only one option for you."
Issei could barely react to the man's right hand deforming into a giant fleshy tentacle and launching directly at him. He moved his right arm to block, but before that a majority of his upper body had been destroyed by the tentacle, leaving a headless body with no chest.
The man let Issei's corpse fall to the ground, still staring at it disapprovingly, his tentacle arm reforming back into a human form.
"Another Failure… A few years wasted."
He got closer to Issei and kneeled to him reaching out to the younger man's still attached right arm.
But before his fingers could make contact with it, he felt an energy flare up from Issei, causing him to instinctively jump backward.
This turned out to be the right call as Issei's body lit up in white flames a second later.
At first, the fire behave like any other flame would, flailing around wildly with no foreseeable pattern. But that changed quickly, as the flames seemingly compressed into themselves, getting smaller, yet denser, forming a layer of liquid-like fire that wrapped around the entirety of Issei's body. It expanded further, filling in the places where Issei's head and chest had been before the man had ripped him apart.
Within moments those places seemingly reformed from the flames, bringing Issei back to a state before his transformation, only his right arm remaining consumed by the darkness.
The flames then disappeared as abruptly as they had appeared, fading away as if they hadn't been there in the first place, only those around the black arm remained, resuming a more realistic behavior instead of tightly sticking to the skin.
Seeing this the man's expression grew frustrated.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
Having no other options the man let both his arms deform into masses of flesh tentacles that promptly rushed Issei filling out almost the entire hallway.
Issei, seeing this, felt the energy within him flaring up with his determination and dashed right at the mass of tentacles, his right arm outstretched towards them.
The moment the flames made contact with the tentacles they were turned into nothing more than ash.
The man, feeling his flesh being destroyed, promptly used one of his tentacles that had already moved past Issei to reach back and pull him out of the mass of tentacles.
Issei was flung against a wall. But he shrugged it off with little care for any injuries the attack might have brought him.
His burning rage stopped him from formulating any kind of strategy against the man and so he was more than ready once more to launch himself at him. But the man wouldn't give him the time to do so, launching another barrage of tentacles, that caused Issei to move his right arm in front of himself in a very amateurish defensive stance.
Thankfully it was enough to defend himself as the flames flare up making a small wall of fire that was extremely efficient at keeping the tentacles at bay. Slowly he began pushing the wall of tentacles back.
But as Issei started feeling confident a single stray tentacle shot along the ceiling past him, intended to use as a way to attack his unguarded back.
Seeing this Issei immediately turned to protect himself which, ironically left his back wide open for all the other tentacles and before he could realize his mistake, he was thrown through one of the doors in the hallway.
Normally this would be rather advantageous for him, since the rooms were so small that the tentacles had almost no way to get past his burning arm, giving him enough time to formulate somewhat of a plan.
But behind the door, there was no simple room.
Instead of landing in a small room with maybe chains on the wall or a chair in the middle of it, he found himself in a ginormous completely white area, so big in fact that he could not see an end to it in any direction, due to a thin fog obscuring his sight after a certain distance. The weirdest aspect by far was the door he had been thrown through. While the door had been destroyed and lay in pieces in front of the frame, the frame itself stood in the middle of the room, not attached to anything.
Yet the man came through the door as if from another room.
"I guess there's no point in holding back anymore."
Issei didn't know what those words meant, only for the man's body to rippled changing in every aspect.
His legs split each in half, before being encased by a few tentacles each, making them stronger than his normal human feet by a long shot. His arms once more formed into thousands of tentacles that were twitching around wildly. The man's face split open like a flower, each of the leaves being filled with tiny sharp teeth.
Issei took a few steps back, he had expected to be something other than human, but he hadn't anticipated such a massive visual change.
Before he could ponder more about the monster's looks the tentacles of the beast shot out to the sides turning in an arc directly towards him.
He was being attacked from both sides.
In an attempt to dodge them he jumped backward, which worked for the initial attack, but once the tentacles smashed into each other, they were assimilated by one another, which caused more tentacles to directly emerge from them.
He wasn't fast enough to dodge them, so he chose to block them.
The first one he punched with his right arm and like all other tentacles it crumbled upon contact with the white flames, but as Issei was still focused on the one he had just disintegrated, he suffered a devastating punch to the gut.
The impact caused Issei to taste some blood in his mouth and before he could recover the barrage of blows continued.
Something emerged from the flames.
The sudden burst of power made the tentacles recoil in both instinct and caution.
It stood, watching its flames conquer the darkness that had once held it.
The flames on Issei's arm grew bigger, wilder, stronger.
The creature revealed its wings.
A mad spark was visible in his eyes as he pulled his arm back
And it took off.
And punched.
The flames flew from his fist, assaulting the tentacles like missiles. Barreling through them straight towards the monster's main body.
The beast reacted appropriately, not letting itself get hit by the burning missiles, but it still suffered from the immense pain that came from its fleshed being burned into ash.
Retracting his tentacles he looked over to Issei.
Issei stood looking at the piles of ash between the two of them.
A pleased smile on his face and raging flames around his right arm.
Pulling back the tentacles the monster let them form a giant ball of mass before throwing it towards Issei obscuring his vision of the main body.
Issei responded as expected, reeling his arm, and punched once more, causing a massive wave of flames to engulf the ball of flesh and quickly take care of it.
But once it had crumbled to ashes, Issei took note of the monster's absence, which immediately put him on high guard, but before he could do anything to ensure his safety felt a hand settle on his head.
Pain.
He could not scream, frozen in place. He only felt the pain pulsing from his head streaming through his entire body.
It felt like a hand was clawing at his soul, attempting to pull it apart or remove something.
But he wouldn't let it.
His rage and determination fused once more and thought off the clawed hand.
Meanwhile, the hand on Issei's head twitched as if directly reacting to what was happening inside of Issei.
As Issei fought of the hand, it started fleeing, but Issei followed.
He wanted it dead, he wanted it to suffer, it to regret what it has done, it to pay for its sins.
An inhuman scream came from behind him, and he felt his body fall back under his command. With a quick jump, he moved away from his enemy.
Turning he saw the monster shake in place, releasing the shrilling screams. It stayed like that for a few moments before its fingers ripped open and revealed a glowing white flame that was eating it from the inside out.
In a panic, the beast detached its burning arm, only for more holes of fire to appear all over its body.
The flames had already spread.
Flailing around wildly, it attempted to somehow extinguish the deadly flames, but no matter what it did, the flames remained, eating its flesh, turning its bones into ash, destroying its skin.
Meanwhile, Issei was watching in silence. He quickly realized that the battle had been decided and noticed that his right arm felt different again. Looking down he saw that the arm had returned to a human form, the veins having completely vanished.
In his peripheral vision, he caught a glimpse of something rapidly approaching. Almost instinctively his senses stretched out towards that general direction, colliding with something that he felt a connection to. And the next moment, the flaming tentacle had stopped in place.
Issei looked up and saw the still burning mass of flesh that was seemingly struggling against his mental hold on it. But as it crumbled down, he loosened his hold, seeing that the threat was reduced to a pile of dust.
Looking further, to where the tentacle had originated from, he was faced with the smoldering corpse of the monster, the man that had tormented him for so long. Now he was nothing more than an inhuman skeleton that was actively being eaten by the fire that had appeared on Issei's arm.
He tugged on the connection that he had used to stop the tentacle and in an instant, all the flames in the area flew towards him. He followed them with his eyes as they flew towards his right arm and seemingly sunk into it, disappearing within it.
Something in Issei told him that he should be happy, basically overflowing with joy, but he wasn't.
He had just killed his tormentor, the man that had forced him to murder in an attempt to make him lose his humanity, yet he still felt like chains were still attached to him.
And at least some of those chains were there because Issei knew that the man had succeeded.
His humanity was just a voice in the back of his head that was barely audible to him.
At first, Issei had despised murder, crying himself to sleep for days after his first few victims, but with the constant repetition of the event and the growing need to hold his darkness back from taking over, his emotions and morality were pushed into the background, leaving behind what was now standing in this empty room, with the corpse of the man, a being whose only connection to the old Issei was the drive to move on, the burning determination to keep going and never let go.
Then the false reality around Issei started crumbling.
=-X-=-X-=
=-X-=-X-=
Josh had a rather simple, but very weird job.
Every day from 6 AM to 3 PM he would sit in a small office watching the camera feed of a room in the hotel and wait.
Wait for what?
For someone to appear in it.
How that was even possible, he did not know.
The room had no windows, and the entrance door had been removed and closed off by a wall at least a year before he had joined the organization.
He had never questioned it, well not aloud at least.
It was impossible for him to not think about it while sitting in a room whose only purpose was centered around the walled-off room.
Just why?
Why would someone make a room completely inaccessible and then make someone watch its insides, that never moved a single inch.
The only thing that had changed over the last few months was how thick the layers of dust now were. After all, there was no way to clean the room.
Josh shook his head, all of that was meaningless to him, he just got paid and protected and for that, he did this every day without complaining.
His job didn't even include writing a report of what changed in the room, which cemented that the people that put him here knew that the room was inaccessible by any means. The only way for him to inform them of any change was a big red button on the same desk the monitor was on.
When he was offered the job, the details of its simplicity were never mentioned and at first, he thought it was a bad joke that some of his enemies had arranged so that he'd bore himself to death.
Then he got paid.
The sheer fact that he got so much money for something so simple shocked him, but he soon concluded that it was not for him to look this gift horse in the mouth. He'd probably fall into a deep rabbit hole that he would not be able to crawl out of and he'd rather be a small insignificant part of whatever this was than being hunted by people who could pay stupid money to a guy for sitting in a room and looking at a screen.
He didn't even care that it was a boring job that he had to attend 63 hours a week, the 49 other hours he had of free time combined with 57 hours of sleep made up for all of it.
Of course, he could squeeze more time for himself by sleeping on the job instead of taking a good 8-hour rest every night, but he was way too scared that he'd piss off the people who had hired him on the off-chance of someone appearing in the room and him not being awake to respond to it.
It was the same reason why he complied with their demand of not taking anything into the room to distract himself with.
Maybe that's why he was picked for the job. Honestly, he didn't know. But in the end, it didn't matter to him either. He had his comfortable life, and they had their guy surveilling an empty room.
And even though it was his job, the very reason he had been hired, he almost flew off his chair when someone appeared out of nowhere, just in the middle of the room.
To be fair it looked like literally, reality had cracked in the middle of the room, before a young man around the age of 16 appeared in the middle of the room, falling a few centimeters, making a wave of dust that had not been moved for years.
Josh barely even took notice of the fact that his hand had slammed down on the red button. His mind was trying to decipher what he had just seen.
It made no sense. It was beyond logic.
But before his mind could fall into theorizing territory, the door to his tiny room was slammed open.
The sharp sound made him take notice of the flaring alarms that were going off in the hallway, previously muffled by the heavy door.
He turned and saw one of the men that had hired him with a gun in his hand.
The barrel in his direction.
The nuzzle flashed.
Then his life flashed in front of his eyes.
It made sense.
His job was to press the button.
No more no less.
He had no purpose beyond that.
Josh was never reported missing, his friends knew better than to annoy the men who took him.
=-X-=-X-=
=-X-=-X-=
Issei found himself in utter darkness.
For a single moment he thought that he had somehow perished, but that thought was banished from his mind when his senses informed him about his surroundings.
It smelt like something old that had not been cleaned in years, the air was full of dust as was the floor, he quickly determined that he was not blinded in any way, but somewhere with no light.
His ears picked up the faint sound of footsteps, but before he could focus more on it, he started to cough due to the thick dust in the air making it hard for him to properly breath.
Before he could fully recover from the small coughing fit, he perceived a loud drilling noise in front of him, followed by the sound of something akin to a grenade launcher, but Issei didn't know what a grenade launcher sounded like, thus he didn't expect the explosion that followed right after.
The grenade ignited only a few meters in front of Issei, blowing him back through the dark room, making him collide with a chair and a table.
His rips had been shattered into tiny pieces that were lunged into his collapsed lungs. His skull looked like a giant had sucker-punched him. No one would recognize his body in this state.
The dust that had been collected over the years on the floor and all over the room was catapulted in the air making a smokescreen.
But Issei did not die.
No, he wouldn't allow himself to pass away that easily.
The corpse rose into a sitting position.
A spark of fire formed on his face.
And the room exploded in a wave of fire.
The thick air full of dust particles caused an explosion that was this time big enough to be noticed from outside the building. Most windows on the top floors were destroyed and the top of the skyscraper came down taking the entire hotel with it, destroying a few other buildings that stood close.
Issei was buried under some concrete, not much due to him being very far up the building and not on the bottom floors. He used the flames that he had lit up to destroy the rumble that had crushed him and let his body fully regenerate.
After a few moments of waiting he was fully healed and climbed out of the rubble. Looking around he was already figuring out how to get away.
There was no good in him staying here. He attracted attention and he'd rather stay low for the time being with his limited knowledge of the world and the fact that he had basically declared war against a giant organization by not only killing their leader but also bringing down their center of operation.
He quickly realized that his getaway wouldn't be easy due to him not only being in the middle of Kuoh but also naked, for his clothes did not share his invulnerability to fire.
But what if they were?
He mentally commanded some of the flames around him, they immediately turned white after falling under his command and began wrapping around himself.
With some concentration they reformed and like with his flesh when it regenerated through the flames, clothes appeared right where the fire pulled itself back to reveal them.
His clothes were identical to those he had worn all the time during his time trapped with the man.
A black jacket with no particular details, a white shirt, black jeans, and black shoes.
It was nothing big, special, or unique, but that was the intent behind the clothes. Simple and unnoticeable.
His senses tingled when someone rushed through the flames behind him and he commanded them to wrap around said figure without hurting them, not yet at least.
Turning he was met with a surprise. A young girl was held there looking at him with utter hatred seemingly ready to rip him in half.
He walked closer to take a closer look at her and she used that as an opportunity to try and burn him with a breath of fire.
Of course, she failed as the flames did not affect him at all.
For Issei though it was more enough of a reason to kill her, seeing that she was trying to murder him.
He swung a fist right into her face which gave an audible crack as her nose shattered under his fist and knocked her unconscious.
A normal person would immediately realize that the blow would not have killed even such a young girl, but Issei had come to know only three general states people could be in.
Alive.
Asleep.
Dead.
And he doubted that someone would fall asleep after a punch to the face, so he commanded the flames to let go of her.
Walking away from the fire, he thought about all the people he had just killed. He could barely hear his humanity crying out and cursing him for doing such a thing, but at the same time, another part of him was really happy that he had. Though in general he just didn't care. He hadn't cared when he executed hundreds of people day after day for a few years. Why would he now?
With those thoughts, he walked next to the survivors towards a hospital that had been far enough for it to survive the destruction of the building, but also close enough for the people to see and run to for help.
Issei simply walked on the opposite side of the road from the hospital and slipped into the giant crowd of people that had formed around an area where the building had caused no damage.
As he walked further, the sound of firemen echoed through the streets and multiple fire engines drove past him.
After around half an hour of walking, he was already at the outskirts of Kuoh. From there it didn't take him long to get to the forest.
He had no plans of staying in Kuoh.
And with that in mind, Issei Hyoudou vanished into the forest.
=-X-=-X-=
=-X-=-X-=
A/N:
I'm back and once more have no idea for how long
At least I did something in contrast to the last few months where I just faded away and somehow still got Followers and Favorites on the original WFR, thanks for that.
While the original is far from finished, with me having had planned something for it in advance, it just didn't work out as half of my storytelling was "make shit up while writing" and while sometimes that worked out, other times… Let's just say I sometimes cringe at the stuff I wrote.
I just didn't have any experience and thought too highly of myself, never checking for either story-based or grammatical mistakes.
Yeah… no, Imma try to actually check everything before embarrassing my future self this time around.
I believe that I have improved in the art of writing, though I still want to improve and grow so please REVIEW my story and tell me what you like and dislike about it and why.
Thanks to everyone who's gonna read this story and also thank you for reading this Author's Note.
Also a huge thanks to everyone who followed and favorited the original WFR and me as an author or even just read one of my stories, I hope this will also be of your liking.
Well, that's all from me, let's hope I stay for real this time.
Have a wonderful day.
And Thank you.
