She called him Aim. One of 72 pawns to use at His discretion.
Before he was called Aim, he was a mortal and weak man. Now he is a Devil, beholden to one. His so called 'father', Lucifer.
He'd rather be beholden to none.
Yet, his position and power ironically shackles him to the nominal title of Duke.
In truth and function that title says nothing but the fact that he is to manage the weaker brood of his kin. Aim lived now within an age before Civilization, before Humanity. Now was the Age before the Titanomachy, where humanity was but primitives and savages worshipping Pagan Gods. The Devil Race, created by a Rebelling Lucifer and his loyal cadre of Fallen with the 'assistance' -unwilling or otherwise- of Lilith had created a barbaric race that still had yet to truly format themselves into a true civilization.
The Fallen Angels had still yet to be even created, Azazel and his merry band still within Heaven. Aim himself had been only been involved with a few mere 'skirmishes' within the Underworld that preluded the soon to be titled 'Great War'. Devils lived within the cracks and crevices of blackened mountains within a pagan-infested Underworld, Angels flew through the purple skies of the Underworld hunting them for sport...
Only recently has Lucifer decided to create his Legions and Nobility, slowly enacting his plan of dominating the Underworld and creating a race of soldiers that could wage war against Heaven itself and bust down the Gates of Heaven. He has created his army, he has his leaders, and now all that was left was to escalate.
In a way, Aim envied his soldiers. A strange thing to think of the masses of sacrificed lives that he ruthlessly spent by the hundreds of thousands without a blink of the eye. Those without the innate power of the 72 clans, and thus not special. He envied their weakness, their faceless nature. Weakness was anonymity in this world, and the greatest power one could ever have was to be faceless and unknowable. Even in a world as nonsensical and bizarre as this one, giant rays of death and destruction needed to be aimed first to be of any threat.
Aim personally loathed his Bloodline, the unique ability that which he was born with. Born greater than his fellow devils. He loathed it, for he saw little point in developing it. Hellfire would likely be the target of jealousy and awe to many, the direct antitheses toward Uriel's Holy Flame. A fire that burns the very soul was a weapon to be wary of, and Aim had to give some respect toward the ability. It was deadly, powerful; yet it lacked weight before something like The Power of Destruction.
It was just so bland! No depth to dive into, no creative spin that he could abuse toward even greater power that would remove him from 'somewhat above average' to 'zenith of might'. Perhaps he could somehow create Hell Plasma, but even then that was something of a stretch.
There was no 'Incarnate of Destruction', and with his middling of Ultimate Class demonic energy reserves he couldn't even pull of the future Serafall's oh so touted feat of freezing the entire Underworld. He could maybe scorch about ten percent of the massive earth like realm if he wanted to.
Weak, pathetic even, hidden behind the allure and guise of being 'powerful' and 'unique'. What was some fire that was likely to be nullified by the Worthless Clan trait or some bullshit defense or immunity do against Trihexia or God? Aim could have all of Lucifer and the rising cadre of individuals who would rise to become his fellow Satans' demonic powers, but it would amount to a fucking thing with his Bloodline. He could burn a world down, but in the face of someone with true power? Someone like God himself - Aim grinned as he felt his brain merely pulse instead of burn when he thought the name- would simply seal has attacks away, before erasing him in a wave of brilliant burning Light.
It was vexing to know that even as he was now, an ultimate devil, the 'second' -not counting super- highest class of an entire race was in reality just a weak mob that would fit better in the roiling packs of faceless devils numbering in the soon to be billions. If he was one of a billion, it was possible that he could fade away into the background and disappear for a few millennium. Training, researching, and generally trying to figure out all of the nuances of his existence as a Devil. Sadly, he was one of 72, and thus couldn't just up and dip into the cracks of the masses of mobs.
Even if he was born low-class, give him a decade and he'd likely be low-high class at his best estimates, and a very tricky high-middle at his worst. Yet, that would be merely his power level in regards to magical power. While this might be weak compared to his current power as a Ultimate Class, it would allow him much needed time to acclimate to his position and discover the secrets and possible exploits toward power that would give him an advantage in this dangerous world.
Aim was merely fourteen years old, and already he was absolutely astounded at the utterly bullshit abilities he'd come up with. It was like wish-craft, but one had to be exceedingly detailed on how said wish would come to be. If steps were skipped, suddenly the cost to cast said spell increased exponentially. A reason why many devils didn't really play around with the ability and stuck to exceedingly refined abilities that demonic energy costs had been cut down by others and passed around or copied by others through greed. Aim watched it happen in real time, with magick circles and abilities being copied, stolen, innovated upon by a bunch of primitives who declared their power with flashy and overly dramatic declarations of power.
Power was everything in this world, where the true power revolved entirely upon one's imagination and creativity. The sheer stupidity of the Devil Race sometimes astounded him, but he couldn't truly blame them. To further complicating, and more accurately 'nerf' Demonic Magick, complex spell casting required the caster to focus and devote an immense amount of mental concentration toward casting such a spell. This devotion of thought and mental effort removed a large amount of possibly broken magic through this world's desperate need for quick laser beams and stupid shows of power.
It was far easier to 'imagine a fireball' or a 'death laser' than it was to imagine something crazy. Something like advanced wormhole-theory allowing the shortening of space within a specific criteria of space without anything in the surroundings, or the one within the wormhole, being harmed. The amount of detail such a thought needed to happen would, at its base require a photographic memory to pair the seen image of space-being-traveled with the complex non-Euclidean geometry of one of those crazy wormhole graphs being overlaid over the real-world image.
Aim, a devil with the memories of someone who'd never watched DxD, but still knew many details regarding the show through second hand sources, further paired with his disdain for his clan trait was the perfect person to look at demonic energy and think how he could exploit it for power.
His first attempt at creating a spell was spurred on by his need to improve his imagination. He needed to imagine a highly detailed image of a brain with neurons firing and scans of high brain activity before 'wishing' for greater cognitive ability. This required a mediation secession of fifteen minutes to acquire an adequate image and a rather manageable drain on his reserves.
He then needed to recall that exact image to cast said spell again without any differences. Thus one can see how difficult it would be to memorize a thought of all things, preventing more nuanced and finer detail Spellcraft. This need of memorization, abstract learning methodology, and exponential cost of faulty and or incomplete spells ironically balanced out the devils ridiculous ability of borderline wish craft.
That was until Aim and the future Akuja Asteroth came along.
Aim would cast his Mental Enhancing Spell, then reimagine the image to greater detail with his boosted mind, cast again, and repeat. In his three months of initial education and indoctrination into the loose primitive 'might-makes-right' of Devil Society, he'd already become a super genius with thought partitioning of an ironic number of 72 partitions and reached an acceleration of said thoughts by a factor of 34.6333. This was further amplified by his ability to then multipath these partitions by a factor of four, turning 72 into 288 lines of thought, most dedicated toward refining and digesting possible spells and incantations of supreme power, along with higher-mathematics. This growth of the mind was only capped in a similar way the Boosted Gear was 'limited'; the body's or in this case brain's ability to cope with the strain.
His first prototypes caused an extreme form of burden on his mind, and led him into hurrying up his research into his next spells. Regeneration and Adaption based spells which would give him confidence to push the spell's boundary. Nowadays, he'd found a comfortable area of power and strain that he constantly adapted to and maintained throughout daily life. Through both his mind's memorization of the spell, and his various thought processes cataloging the duration of the spell, it was practically auto-casted on him at all times.
The drain on his reserves was minimal, as the spell was rather light on energy requirements after being optimized and his mind turned it from a fifteen minute cast to an instant one. Although, without the spell to assist him in the process of detail recollection on the now stupidly complex spell pattern, it would take him hours to cast the spell and he would likely need to revert back to older variants to build back up.
Aim supposed it was unfair to blame the lazy, ungrateful, prideful, gluttonous, envious, and lustful primitives that was the devil race to come up with this formation pattern. The reincarnates of the future would likely have already established means of magical ability or not enough power to truly experiment with the energy like he had. Furthermore, someone with scientific knowledge regarding the brain's function would likely find logical mental-blocks of ingrained education that would prevent them from reaching into a more mystical and less scientific answer in upgrading their imaginative ability.
Being taught by sedentary devils and reading through ancient knowledge of magic passed down through centuries, all the while being actively dissuaded from experimentation and encouraged to leave it to the 'experts' on magic likely assisted in stagnating or outright halting the secrets of demonic energy that Aim had discovered.
Not that what he'd discovered was easy, he'd likely have stalled or stagnated in his partitions and thought acceleration if he hadn't also developed a regeneration spell and adaption spell.
The regeneration spell was less a singular spell, and more a collection of projects designed to make him as hard to kill as possible.
The first objective was to not have a singular active weakness on his body. An example being his heart or brain. This spell worked by attaching his soul to his body as a whole, effectively making his body a phylactery. He called this spell signature 'Solipsism', named after the philosophy that the self is the only thing that can truly be proven to exist. Solipsism stopped him from dying when his body was dead, and instead he'd only die when his body was destroyed to every last cell. This included the vials of sealed blood and biological matter hidden in locations around the underworld. While these 'horcruxes' could theoretically could be exploited against him by using his blood or biological matter in some voodoo-esque ritual of some sort; Corvac used his slacking Bloodline Ability to instinctually render all unwillingly shed biological matter into Hellfire, much like the Phenex Bloodline, but without the instantaneous regeneration and with black flames.
To prevent any dramatic risk of exploitation, he had his sealed cells hidden throughout the Underworld's extensively expansive cavernous systems deep underground which were populated with dangerous Hell Beasts that would dissuade anyone from trying to find the small glass beads of blood hidden away in the underground. They didn't exude any truly mystical powers or spiritual 'scent', and the only way Aim believed that they could be found was through exceptionally specific and impossibly powerful divination. He bet on the stench and miasma of Hell, an actually physical place located at the center of The Underworld, to obscure such spells. Any actual magical attempt would likely 'flag' those areas to curious senses as having something worth hiding.
It was while further developing his Mental Enhancement Spell, a spell he called 'Believer', that he started to truly find the synergistic feed-back loop of his Regenerative and Adaptation spells.
He named 'Believer' as such, due to many of his personally created spells holding a unique property of being based on 'Belief'. He forced not just himself to truly believe certain facts or symbiological nuances of his spells through self-hypnosis, but forced reality as a whole to believe these things conceptually happened or existed.
Using Believer to its utmost and pushing it to its tried and true limits in creating partitions of thoughts, he felt his brain start hemorrhaging. He didn't die or feel any adverse effects form this otherwise horrific injury, as he started to use his spiritual-self to support his sapience thanks to Solipsism. In the process, Aim felt the speed and variety of thoughts drop down to his base level. An unfortunate weakness that severe brain-damage would 'dispel' Believer, but one that due to its busted nature, he felt was a good 'balancing feature'.
This unfortunate event allowed him to finally use his 'healing' and 'regenerative' spell that he'd so keenly tested on his fellow devils!
Aim's soul held within him an always refreshing 'snapshot' of his brain's neural structure. A wave of Demonic Energy would then envelop his brain and develop a massive brain tumor. Then another pulse of demonic energy would devour the tumor and use the excess biological matter to repair his hemorrhaged brain; or any injure really.
Demonic energy was shit at healing. What it was good at was devouring, corrupting, and stealing. His regeneration worked by forcing damaged cells into a massive and utterly uncontrolled replication period, commonly called cancer. His magic categorized this as 'Corruption', thus easy and cheap in terms of Demonic Energy consumption. Then his demonic energy 'devoured' the 'corruption' and 'permanently relocated' the 'devoured corruption' into beneficial areas needing healing and resources as dictated by a saved engram of his bodies ideal state stored inside his soul; thus stealing.
Fleshweaving, what he named this type of magic, at its finest. These magical and creative loopholes made Aim love Devil Magick, and was also why he comparatively hated his Bloodline Trait. There wasn't anything truly interesting, clever, or creative in producing a massive amount of fire. Sure it was cool as shit, hell Yamamoto from Bleach was a dope as shit character and his shtick was burning everything to the ground. It just didn't satisfy his creative impulses enough for him to deem it worthy of his Pride.
If other Devils could hear his thoughts and heard that he thought his clan trait was unworthy of his Pride, they'd call him the incarnate of Pride.
His next neat little spell was one he worked laboriously over. See, Aim hated the idea of having weaknesses. In various games, he always played as the Tank, usually one that could preferably heal. While Paladins were his last choice in that list -being too cliché in his opinion- things like Life-Steal, Retribution Effects, and most importantly Resistances that let him tank and outlast his opponents were key to any build he liked creating. In came Dark Adaptation, a ritual-effect that was entirely supported by his conceptual understanding of ARPGs and Video Game resistances. These games had 'resistances' that reduced damage dealt from that specific type of damage.
Through a complex ritual, Aim had created a detailed list of conceptually accurate Symbiology that represented types of damage. Sadly, Aim couldn't just 'wish' to suddenly be immune or super resistant against all types of damage. Wishcraft Devil Magick might be, but rules there still existed. Instead of gaining such resistances, Aim obtained the ability to gain such things dependent entirely on the various forms of symbiology that he used in that ritual. Through being injured or effected by these effects, he'd gain according percentage resistances towards that very-same damage type.
Each of his abilities were developed by a need or want. Believer was created due to wanting to streamline and upgrade his ability to utilize his race's busted magick. Dark Adaptation was created through his fear of long-lasting effects that weren't physically capable of being healed. He'd included a good dozen symbols representing abstract things like 'soul', 'death', 'chaos', 'curse', 'evil', 'light', and even a very vague 'energy' based resistance. This was him prepping for the coming ever escalating war against Heaven and the political turmoil after the multiple Millennia long war in the distant future. If he is inflicted with something like 'Light Poisoning', a 'status effect' that many Devils have died to, he'd eventually develop a resistance toward it and become capable of regenerating. Or, if the 'Great Devil Faction' uses their Sleeping Disease against him, then either Curse or Disease Resistance will wake him up eventually. Solipsism, on the other hand, was created due to his fear of Death Rays from God and Baal. He really didn't want to get one shotted.
Spreading out his wings, Aim looked down at the roiling mass of millions of Devils. His legions given to him by Lucifer himself to be commanded by Aim alone.
As he posed dramatically, Aim's face twisted as if he'd sucked on a lemon, side eying the five pairs of demonic wings that sprouted from his back.
While looking far better than the ones shown in the show, 2D as it was, it still felt cringe having ten devil wings and having to act like it was something impressive. It was just really, really cringe worthy.
With a sigh of exasperation and reluctance, Aim unsheathed his longsword from his waist. The blade burst into a black flame, consuming all but the handle.
Aim might complain and whine about his powers lack of potential development, they were cool looking. Humming a half remembered song of a life once lived, Aim raised the blade and pointed it toward the horizon of the Underworld. Holy light cascaded over the sightline, yet with a flex of his demonic energy, Aim enhanced his eyes to see distances and detail that would make even supernatural hawks green with envy. Imagination-Based Magick and natural Shapeshifting was unfathomably versatile. Aim loved the ability of a Devil's body to morph and and shapeshift into biological monstrosities. He had plenty of time creating a good few templates for his army to use.
Eyes narrowed, Aim he caught sight of The War Maiden herself, Gabriel. Garbed in a suit of full-plate mail armor made of holy metal, paired with the twelve white feathered wings fanning out behind her, she evoked an intimidating aura. An uncountable number of angels hovered in his enhanced sight behind the Seraphim. A flick of a finger and a spell was projected toward the host, its power weak, and thus undetected until it hit.
As a small trace of demonic energy collided over the host of Angels, they all tensed, flaring holy auras in an attempt to throw off what ever trickery had been cast at them. Aim meanwhile nodded as his radar-like spell reported to him that the enemy had 594,322 Angels. While it didn't get the profiles of power levels, Aim didn't really care about such a thing. Power only went so far before the dagger snuck between your ribs and into your heart, or a spell slipped past your defenses and cursed your very soul.
Still pointing his sword toward the host of Angels, Aim broadcast his orders to all of his 'troops'.
"Die for me. At least take one of them with you if you'd be so kind." Even in Devil culture such an order would ruffle a few personalities regardless of his rank as a Duke and power.
Yet, this was Aim's Legion, a legion of Devils that he alone controlled and thus trained. Each and every single one of these pawns was trained in the arts of suicide bombing, lasts stands, and guerrilla warfare. The least they could do was make the enemy bleed a bit.
Sigils and runes, real and imagined, danced into a cylindrical geometrical formation surrounding Aim's blade. Moved by an unseen force, they compiled themselves into an unending wall of scriptures and profane knowledge, before melding with the blade. Meanwhile, a massive runic formation manifested itself a meter below Aim's flying form.
Aim himself was chanting, muttering poems in a language created by ten of his minds. This language that he called 'The Black Tongue' was created to be the most foul, horrific, and utterly profane language imaginable. Inspired by Tolkien and his Black Speech, it was a language that only Aim understood how to speak, but that was all that was needed.
Each word he spoke contained a meaning, and each meaning was backed by his demonic energy projecting that meaning upon the world. This meaning was then further supported by syntax, grammar, and contextual linguistics of the language itself before being powered up by a selection of Sigils, runes, and images projected upon reality by his divided and boosted minds.
The massive runic formation, meanwhile, projected down upon roughly thirty thousand devils of the low and middle class. As they gawked at the massive magical formation, the like they'd never seen before, a sense of horrific dread took hold of them. Black mist drifted from the black floating script, a harsh gust and before anyone knew it, thirty thousand devils were swallowed by the mist. All that remained were blackened bones.
The massive amounts of harvested demonic energy, chaotic life force, and damned souls that the formation harvested swelled back up into the ongoing ritual. The previously pitch black characters and geographical shapes shining bright crimson, and started expelling more black mist.
"Die to the Angels, and face the mercy of a quick death. Stay or flee, and you shall face me." Aim stated through telepathic communication, broadcasting the ultimatum down to his army of three million souls, minus a recently deceased thirty thousand.
As the black mist descended once more, the devils, both low and mid spread their wings wide and took off the ground bolting toward the Angelic Host. They moved with a fervor and utterly fatalistic degree of motion, every muscle in their body working as they either ran or flew; less charging, and more desperately seeking to create the largest possible distance away from the Devil Lord that owned their souls.
Every being under his gaze was utterly ecstatic for the chance at a such a death. For it truly was a great offer. Aim owned them. Body, Soul, and Mind. He'd forced the strongest to sign contracts written in blood, then had them force those weaker to sign the contracts; everyone signed, and everyone served in utmost entirety. Their free-will was null and void, for Aim's greed demanded they served him with everything they were.
In the face of such domination, paired with their horrific training within his hellish labratoriums carved inside of deep caverns within the darkest pits of the Underworld: None of the creatures who served Aim feared death; for them, death was Freedom and Salvation. Freedom from Aim, and Salvation as their souls would be wrestled from his every greedy grasp.
Aim watched them, peering around for any stragglers who hadn't signed his contracts. He found none. That made him smile. He took a deep breath, raising the blade that had just finished being cursed, enchanted, buffed, inscrolled, inscribed upon, and generally turned into an instrument of unholy death dealing. He assumed only God's Light could heal a wound from the blade he now held, and even then with a difficulty that would likely stun the creator deity. It was a blade that would have been considered a Sacred Gear when God got around to making them, if the effect wasn't temporary.
Aim sheathed the blade, black flames and ghastly wails streaming out of the scabbard as it was push inside the obsidian sheathe. His arms raised and he stopped his as of yet uninterrupted chants of the Black Tongue.
With a flex of mental effort, Aim gathered the collected life forces, otherwise known as Touki in this universe, and started to kneed and mold them to his will. Separating and then mixing the life force, adding in the elements of chaos, instability, and then amplifying the mixture of harvested life into a weapon that only mortals from the modern era would fear with a passion. Injecting a tad bit of demonic energy with a set of instructions, he released the weapon.
With a lazy wave of his hand, a wave of life left the ritual circle, rocketing off toward the Angel's host and quickly passing over his still 'fleeing' Devil legions; they were experienced enough to know not to get in the way of their lord's firing range. The bright green aura that represented life force was darker, reminding him ironically of the fictional depiction of uranium. Fitting given its affects. As it traveled it slowly spread out into a massive cloud of opaque green.
Ignoring that spell's delayed effects, he turned his attention to the boiling mass of souls. Wailing in agony and fear as they knew they'd died. Soul Reapers would be upon this location soon enough, but Aim didn't exactly care as they'd declared neutrality in the war and wouldn't get involved for something as minor as a ritual such as this.
Taking great care, he gathered his demonic energy before slamming it down with savage might onto the souls. Bolstered by the ritual, the souls full of will and personality broke and shattered into pieces and fragments of memories, sins, emotion, and will. He continued this process until he obtained fragments of reasonable size. He collected and compressed them into his palm.
Crossing his forearm over his chest, Aim threw the fragments of souls like ninja stars, mentally imagining the appropriate 'sounds' as the fragments of demonic souls made no sound as they traveled. What started out as a single foul purple projectile quickly split off into roughly 150 thousand soul fragments.
Aim then folded in his wings and sat down on the magical formation, drawing in the stolen demonic energy. As he meditated his mouth whispered more words and text floated around his body. Buffs, Augments, Alterations, and magical enchantments filled his body. Some caused him to glow in different colors, others tattooed his skin, and others had his muscles writhe under his skin. He growled as Rage and Wrath was artificially gathered from the emotions he'd harvested from his Contracted Slaves, bolstering his physical strength to unnatural levels.
With a seething glare directed to the distant Host of Heaven's Armies, he gave a demonic growl, "Makin' me work for this shit..." Aim grumbled.
He'd be done with these enhancements soon, then he'd use the remaining demonic energy to top off his reserves, and then boost them to a level that he felt comfortable using to face a Satan class enemy.
"All in a day's work." He mumbled.