A Different Deal

Disclaimer: Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun and its characters were created by Osamu Nishi.

Summary: What if Iruma's parents had summoned Kalego instead of Sullivan when looking to make a deal? How might events play out differently?

I plan write this with as much respect to the canon as I can, as with the canon divergent AU's I've worked on for other series. I like writing the characters and world as close to canon as possible, trying to catch how they would react to the situations well. I will be using aspects from both the manga and anime since each has material that the other doesn't.

Iruma doesn't show up until Chapter 3; the first chapters focusing on Kalego. I seem to have a habit of writing things from a teacher's perspective. It might have something to do with working in outdoor education for a while.

I will be honest; I am going on a posting spree right now because I am having a rough time and seeing people's comments makes me feel better. This has had no corrections except those that I could find. Sorry if there are too many errors and it causes distractions. I was originally hoping to have more of this story done than I currently do before I started. I have no idea how far I will go with it.

Meeting The Embodiment of Greed

As Kalego opened the door to his home, he sighed heavily.

He'd tried to make the most of the break before the new school year but that time was drawing to a close. Tomorrow, he would be back at Babyls, checking to make sure the grounds and surrounding territories for any changes in the environment that might affect the safety of the school and working on the final preparations in order to make sure that everything was properly set up for the next day's ceremony for the new batch of first year brats.

Kalego hoped the black cat that had crossed the path on his way home had just been a coincidence and not an omen. Although he wouldn't be surprised, considering that the Chair Demon could always swoop in and wreck his plans on a whim at any given moment.

Kalego's thoughts were suddenly interrupted as his surroundings, his home, suddenly faded away, leaving him suspended in a vast expanse of glowing red swirls, the only thing lighting up the otherwise pitch darkness. Glancing down, he saw black plumes rising from below.

If it weren't for that magical energy pulsing around him, Kalego would have thought this was a bizarre dream. But the thrum against his skin left no doubt that this was happening. The air was so charged with it that it almost had a physical pressure the likes of which he'd never felt before; and working under one of the big three, that was saying something. He felt an involuntary shiver and as he crossed his arms to hide it, he felt goosebumps rising from his skin. Whether it was from the saturation of power or be sca…unsettled, he couldn't say.

At first, nothing happened in this darkness. Just him and the dark shadows from below among his shifting glowing surroundings. There was no gravity. Nor was there any flow from of air over him as he moved, although it must have been there since he could still breathe.

What if he was stuck here in this strange place? It was amazing how quickly the treacherous, cowardly thought crept in and settled in the back of Kalego's mind. Almost worse; a part of his mind arguing against it brought up that if worst came to worst, Sullivan would probably rescue him.

But the thought was enough to get his mind working properly again…because like he was going to let the old coot hold something like this over him.

He fought the urge to hiss at the darkness in anger, an incredibly childish reaction that he knew would accomplish nothing. Still, when he tried to put up a magical shielding spell he'd drawn up to block out any magic-based attacks, he was frustrated to find it almost instantly diffused into the red swirls.

Kalego then tried summoning his wings and flapping them to move somewhere. Anywhere. The results were even more pathetic than with is spells.

Come on; he was a Chet ranked demon. Surely, he could do something here! He wasn't some rankless welp!

Then a flat, glowing object suddenly appeared in the distance, rushing toward him…or maybe he was rushing toward it. Either way, as it came close, he saw that it was some sort of summoning circle, although he'd never had one work like this before. Of course, he'd never been pulled to a summoning circle through a space like…whatever this was.

Before Kalego knew what was happening, he had passed through the circle, leaving the strange shadow world of pulsing magic behind to be bombarded by one of light, air and sound.

And Gravity, which Kalego instinctively flapped his wings to adjust to in hopes of avoiding a crash. Instead, this only led to him to bouncing off of some sort of magical barrier and crash gracelessly to the ground anyway, unable to recover fast enough. And there was no give in the stony surface he slammed into despite his initial efforts, scraping up the arm he'd used to brace himself.

As he sucked in a breath and winced, his nose was filled with a scent of something that would have been mouthwateringly delicious if not mixed with a sickening concoction of filth and noxious fumes.

Kalego growled as he forced himself to rise from his compromising position on the floor as his eyes only just began to his surroundings. But ever so slowly, for although the space he was in was in the shadows, bright light shown in through pillars.

Then he heard a pair of voices warbling to each other in a foreign tongue he couldn't even begin to decipher.

Kalego's eyes had adjusted enough that he could look in their direction and make out silhouettes.

"What do you want?" he asked, his words echoing and being changed into something unrecognizable.

As the two figures looked at him, Kalego's was beginning to make out their features. There was a man with dark blue mop and woman whose own hair was just a shade lighter talking to each other and pointing at him, seeming to disregard his question or that he had spoken at all. The man started talking and although his words were in the same language as before, the 'echoes' were warped into his own tongue. "We didn't really think that would work!"

The man stepped closer but stopped just short of a set of powdery white lines.

It was the spell circle he'd passed through earlier, except the glowing shape had been replaced by chalk drawn across a black, cracked surface. An unstable thing that looked like it could be broken simply by a swipe of his foot to smear the medium or a flap of his wings to blow it away. But considering the number of symbols and runes he didn't recognize and the lack of many others that tended to show up in most summoning circles, tampering with it could be dangerous to him.

And didn't that make Kalego's skin crawl. The idea of being caught up in a spell too powerful for him to escape the pull of and not even be completely sure what it does was absolutely terrifying. Among the symbols he did recognize was that of Chet symbol that seemed to indicate that he had been randomly summoned among the members of his rank. He wouldn't be surprised if the symbol had been chosen at random, itself.

Kalego looked back at his captors who he could easily make out, now. They both had obviously rounded ears and lacked any visible horns or wings but he could see blood dripping from the male's hand, undoubtedly the summoner. Still, he saw no sign of the power source strong enough to summon him across whatever that dark place had been. Whatever it was had probably burned up in the flame of the candle in the middle of the circle with the bloody paper they undoubtedly used to activate the spell.

Keeping one eye on the beings at all times to make sure that they didn't try something, Kalego glanced around. He was in some area that seemed to be shaped of some type of stone conglomerates that had been shaped relatively smooth, all grays and blacks. It was supported by some pillars between open air spaces instead of walls.

The place was old, cracks running through the rough floor and occasionally showing up in the pillars. Random surfaces were painted with various overlapping, mostly unfamiliar symbols and occasionally interspersed with crude pictures.

Kalego focused on his disdain. He focused on displaying his annoyance, not wanting these things to catch on that he was scared in the slightest.

Although Kalego's observations only took moments, it seemed to be long enough for the pair before him to move beyond their initial amazement. Emboldened, they stepped forward.

Kalego glared at them again with all his fury and asked, "Why am I here?"

The man stepped forward displaying an old dusty, beat up, pocket sized tome with some sort of leathery hide cover and began to speak. For half a second, Kalego couldn't understand what he was saying, some of the unknown runes which made him nervous started to glow with a slightest tinge of the red they'd had in the darkness and an 'echo' sprung up that he could understand. "We found this book and saw it had a Summoning Spell for striking Deals and we want to make one."

"A…deal." Spellbound deals of any type were powerful. For people who knew what they were doing, it could prove very beneficial but they were very dangerous for their binding properties. Even the familiar summoning ritual, broadly considered the safest of such deals, were heavily monitored when performed. He knew; he was one of if not the best authorities on the process in all of Babyls.

"Yeah," the woman stated as she approached him and said, "we want to be rich!"

"Give me that," Kalego commanded, gesturing to the book. "I want to know the rules to this spell and how it works."

They did as he said and passed it to him. No questions. No suspicion. They might have just handed him the means to turn the scales on them and they didn't care. They were either extremely powerful or terribly stupid.

If he were a betting demon, he'd lean toward the latter. The thing is, he didn't survive to his current rank by gambling blindly.

Maybe Kalego could use the book to wriggle out of this and be gone. These things did admit to being inexperienced.

The moment Kalego had the tome in hand and he began to thumb through it. For a moment, it was full of unreadable symbols but then a ripple of magic passed through it, translating it to easily understandable demon writing. He found himself staring at a mix of spells and while many had elements that he was familiar with, most also had many aspects that he didn't know, a few being completely unrecognizable. He turned toward the beginning, where the pages lacked spells altogether. Instead filled with descriptions of their use for contact between beings of different dimensions…which, if even half of these were real, that was terrifying…not to mention, they would cause Sichiro to lose his mind.

Speaking of which, Kalego paused as it flipped to a particular description and looked back at the people before him.

"What are you?"

"Japanese…" the man said.

He had no idea what that meant, "you're species is Japanese?"

"Oh…no, that's our nationality," The woman said. "We're humans!"

"There aren't any of us back in your world?" the man asked.

"No, there aren't." Kalego couldn't help but think of how Sichiro would react if he had met these creatures… These were the legendary 'humans?' He wasn't impressed.

Kalego flipped forward to the spells, thumbing through pages until he found one that displayed the summoning circle he now stood in. And although he could tell that there was a way to escape right now, this book was a new wrinkle in the problem.

There was no way he could leave something this powerful in the hands of any creature this dense. He got the distinct impression that it was as dangerous as any book in the forbidden section of Babyls's library. What he'd do with it, he'd have to figure out later. For now, he just needed to get it away from these things.

"So, I assume you want to trade this book for riches?" Seemed simple enough. "Show me the currency and tell me how much of it you for this." He had the perfect duplication spell for whatever form of payment they wished to receive.

"Oh, we can use it, too?" The woman asked.

"That's awesome!" the man exclaimed.

Kalego fought the urge to vocalize his amazement that something as stupid as them can survive at all and instead asked. "What, exactly, were you going to offer, then?"

"We were going to offer our son's soul." The man said cheerfully.

"Excuse me?" Kalego asked, sure that he must have misheard or his spell mistranslated. He couldn't have heard that correctly.

But the man continued and Kalego knew that, to his horror, he had. "The stories we have say that demons like trading deals for people's souls or something. But you don't even know what we are, so we could probably make more selling him elsewhere. Do you think we'd have better luck with a Spirit?"

"Or one of those fae things, maybe?" The woman chimed in. "The book said that they like getting first born children in particular!"

"Wait a minute, he hasn't said no yet. You don't want to have to draw a whole new circle if we don't have to, do you?

"It did take a really long time to draw," the woman consented. "Especially since we had to start all over every time we messed up."

The man nodded as he pulled out a notepad held together by a coil of metal, tearing a sheet off the top and holding it out to him. A tiny yellow thing that was now missing a ragged strip that seemed to have joined a set of similar pieces by holes the metal coil passed through.

As Kalego looked at the paper, he suddenly understood that some of the symbols he hadn't comprehended were indeed high level binding spells, more powerful than he'd ever seen but not of the usual nature. A binding of words written and spoken, reminding him of the forbidden texts which so much as stuttering while speaking would be certain doom.

As Kalego touched the scrap, it changed back and forth between his language and the unreadable symbols of the humans until the other released his hold on the paper.

Kalego could tell that any deal made with it would be unbreakably binding if made within this circle. And the only way to escape it was if the terms to initiate the deal weren't met within a certain amount of time, the amount it took for the magic of the spell to reach completion by sending him back to the netherworld, according to the book.

This all smelled of a situation for Yud to deal with, not a Chet ranked individual. In one last desperate attempt to weasel his way out of doing this, he pulled out his Hellphone, willing to pass the buck to the damn Chairdemon if he could, consequences be damned.

But, at the sight of zero bars, despite having the magical settings to get reception anywhere, Kalego confirmed what deep down, he already knew; there was just him, in way over his head but knowing he had no choice but to proceed. Otherwise, this book could end up causing terrible damage and a child would be doomed.

Because, yes. These people really did want to hand off their son. Behind the note was another, more firm scrap, which turned out to be a slightly creased picture of a young boy.

A normal demon would hardly have felt anything for a child they didn't know, even at the sight of a picture. They had no connection more than any other stranger and therefore wouldn't care about this child's well being.

Kalego had never had that luxury. The branch of the Naberius Clan that focused on protectors of other demons had long ago found that individuals who could build stronger than average emotional attachments often pushed themselves further to defend others than most other demons. So, they secretly bred for it, even if it left descendants fighting to hide these feelings and cope with them. His uncle was a prime example, smoking and drinking to deal with the stress of defending Babyls at a time when it was far more chaotic; specifically, to be present for every child that was crippled or died on the school's grounds. It was only at his most inebriated that he admitted how much it bothered him and since he never remembered his admission when sober, Kalego didn't say anything. He just got slightly looser with his cash when the other came begging for more of it to feed his means of escape.

Say what he would about Opera; without his and Ballum's help, Kalego doubted they could have cleaned up that mess of a school. And Kalego refused to let his school fall to such a state of madness again. To test if he could hold himself together where his uncle broke if placed in the same position.

Even now, with all the order he helped enforce to protect them, some of the brats still managed to slip through the cracks as was bound to happen. And though Kalego made jokes about or throw threats at particularly troublesome brats from time to time, if it came down to it, he'd step in to step in…although he might let the more stubborn ones take a few hard knocks first to learn their lesson and he wouldn't have to worry about a 'next time.'

Kalego wasn't going to let a child he could save right now suffer at the hands of morons, demon or no. He knew that this picture ensured that he would strike this bargain and commit to this awful magic. These people were already talking about trying to contact another world to sell the boy off to if he turned them down. They were going to keep summoning until either they were killed or someone took their deal and dragged the child off to whatever fate they intended for him.

Although Kalego wouldn't mind the first as it would have brought on by these creatures own stupidity, the idea of leaving a child who had no say in this to get tossed to a monster from some strange otherworld made him physically sick. Quite a feat in its own right, as he'd witnessed some questionable things in his life.

"The child too, then," Kalego finally said, words like ash on his tongue even while he told himself not to think of it as buying a person but paying a ransom, in hopes that it would make this feel less gross. It didn't. "Just let me make some quick adjustment to this…agreement. What's his name?"

"Iruma."

Kalego wrote it down. "And is he the only child you have?" He asked as continued to make amendments to the 'document.'

"Yeah. Why?"

"Just making sure I take everything into account as I make the deal." Because Kalego wasn't going to allow any more youngsters to be trapped in their care if he could help it. "You wouldn't want a miswording to unravel your deal, would you? Then all the money you're getting for your boy would disappear." He couldn't hide the disgusted sneer as he stated this.

The humans remained silent as he made his adjustments, magically scratching old words that wouldn't erase and inserting his own additions. Kalego didn't even bother to correct their spelling errors, one of which, a misspelling of soul, worked in favor of the changes he wanted to make. Finally, he gave it one last read over.

To what ever makes this deal KalegoNaberius,

We wanna Offr our 1stand only until the end of time kid's (Iruma's) Sole guardianship in trade for…

Naberius purposefully skipped over the number, having no comprehension of it's value nor wanting to understand the price these people considered worth selling off their only child. He continued reading over the paragraph, checking the rest of his alterations.

You can have him and keep him forever and ever as a warduntil he either reaches adulthood or is placed in the care another guardian deemed fit to properly provide for him by the demon listed above. He is a hard worker who will and will do whatever he is told and never lash out in any way, so he willmake a good slave if you want that or you can eat him or whatever. will be provided for, ensuring all his needs as a child of his age are properly met.

Satisfied as he could be with such a deal, Kalego then went an added an additional paragraph to get his hand on the book for what he hoped was a paltry amount. He then proceeded to ignore the names at the bottom of the page, as these two were not worthy of such recognition.

Kalego was hoping that they would be too lazy to look over the changes he'd made too closely. He needn't have worried. All they saw was the numbers they wrote on the page and that he was willing to agree.

It seemed like the humans couldn't get out a pen fast enough as they jotted their own signatures down beneath his. As they did so, the world faded back to that red and black darkness. Then, the paper became two and as they each grabbed up their copies, the human world faded back in.

Still, Kalego could feel the weight of the unbelievable, previously unimaginable magic filled darkness that was just beyond this reality. It was like realizing a floor of a building was ever so slightly slanted. Before noticing, it can easily go unnoticed, all signs pointing to it easily dismissible but once noticed, it is dismissible and undeniable, even if the other people in the room can't feel it.

As they showed him a piece of paper currency, he spent time making several exact copies of it that the two were satisfied with giving him both brat and book. And if he slipped a few curses onto the couples newly made cash that might impact their fortunes in the future, well they should have specified they didn't want a little extra magic on their end of the deal if they didn't want it…

Kalego took the book before he finally said, "alright, where is he?"

-/

I have the way the summoning spell works vary so much from the Familiar Summoning Spell in the series because Kalego is being pulled into another universe, rather than just being called upon by a spell within his world. It also is a completely different type of summoning, for bargaining between two parties, rather than a summoning where one party binds and limits the actions of the other.

I can't help but think that in future Anime top tens (and probably some current ones I haven't seen) for worst parents, Iruma's parents are going to hold pretty high positions for a very long time.

Although there is a focus on humans, in a flashback with Ameri, her father gives humans as an example of the creatures they have to deal with. Personally, I chose to interpret that as possibly meaning there are others out there. Henri Azzezel clearly knows the process for getting humans back to their own world, meaning he the boarder patrol has the means to move between dimensions. Although I'm not really going to explore the concept overly much, I liked the idea of fleshing out this universe in that way. It seemed like the risk of a child being tossed to anything among various world's willing to take him was a good way to get Kalego to decide to step in. It also gives further context to just how bad Iruma's parents were, to be willing to throw their own child to such a terror.

Hopefully, you like this start to the story. I will probably post the next chapter soon. Iruma won't show up until chapter 3.