Alfred Evander was an unusual young man. At a surface glance, one wouldn't find that surprising. His shock of blood red hair would catch anyone's attention, and the intense amber of his eyes tended to keep said attention. He could be called handsome, but the young man would likely ignore it and think it mere flattery.
Him being an American and moving to Japan didn't help much either. Most American immigrants to the country (what few there were), tended to live in the more popular cities, like Tokyo. Alfred didn't much have that luxury, having been all but forced to either keep struggling in the foster system or move to an obscure city in Japan.
It was an unusual predicament, but then, he was an unusual person.
"I didn't know Japan had Catholics."
Kuoh was a very strange city (or "town" as it called itself despite its size). Western religious symbols seemed to crop up rather frequently, and never in an overtly marketable way. A preacher stood on a corner, spreading pamphlets alongside his disciples or whatever, while a store a few blocks down had a cross hanging on the front door. It was more religion than he was used to seeing even back in the states, from what little memory he had, and was even more of a shock to see in Japan of all places.
Perhaps that was his small worldview to blame.
Alfred kept his thoughts to himself, leaving them a slight whisper under his breath at most. He didn't much want to offend anyone, and the looks being thrown his way as he walked towards the address that had been written in the letter sent to him were already too much for him to bear. He wondered if perhaps wearing something a bit less worn down would have helped his problem, but that was wishful thinking at best. Was wearing a torn leather jacket and jeans ripped from use rather than style the only thing making him stand out? Not in the slightest.
Besides, it wasn't as if he couldn't change what his outfit looked like in an instant.
The duffel bag which held all his personal belongings smacked against his back with every step, stopping only when he did as he finally came to his destination: Kuoh Academy Student Dorms.
The academy wasn't something he knew too much about, only that it was a private high school which hybridized Japanese and western customs into an odd mishmash. Anything else was nearly impossible to find, as there were almost no traces of it on the internet save the odd forum post with no replies. Even after landing in Japan and trying to find more information on it on the country's own internet, nothing showed up.
Suspicious, but it was his best chance so far.
Making his way to the front door, he pulled a keycard that had been sent within the letter from his pocket and held it against the scanner. The door unlocked, and he hurried inside before someone could see him. He really didn't want to have to talk to anyone if he didn't have to, that never really went well for him.
It was a quick jaunt from the main area to the elevator, his foot tapping against the floor as he pressed the button to the 6th and highest floor. The bland if not calming elevator music reached his ear, and he found himself tapping along to the beat of the song rather than the beat of his anxiety. He was almost disappointed when it ended but moved swiftly as he read the small signs posted on the walls directing towards which rooms each of the four halls held.
"626. 626. Remember, six twenty-six."
He whispered that to himself, not totally afraid of forgetting it but still concerned enough with the idea of accidentally trying to enter a stranger's room that he did so anyway. That would perhaps be his undoing, as his occasional glances to the paper in his hand left him just barely ignorant of a young blond man who he was mere feet from barreling through.
"Woah!"
The exclamation shook Alfred from his focus, nearly making him jump as he stopped dead in his tracks and evaluated the situation the best he could. The young man before him was surprisingly not Japanese, instead looking more European with his blond hair and blue eyes. The only reason he would even say European rather than American, of course, was the regal way he stood and presented himself which, Alfred decided, was a very unamerican thing.
"Oh, uh, sorry for almost bumping into you."
He tried not to move too much, tried not to let his emotions quiver beyond the norm. He had a chance to start from fresh here, but there was no way he could even attempt that if he let his unnatural aura ruin his chances yet again.
"It's fine, no harm done."
Alfred had little idea how to go from this point, uncomfortable with the idea of just walking away to his dorm but equally unsure on how to actually introduce himself here in this situation. Thankfully, he didn't really need to.
"Are you alright?"
Despite how pathetic it sounded in his head, he was kind of glad for the segue. At least it was an easy bouncing off point. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Just a bit nervous is all. Just moved to Japan and classes start tomorrow so… yeah."
The blond laughed in such a way that it didn't feel directed at him, rather instead presenting him as more sympathetic to the idea. "I understand. I felt the same way just a year ago, though I wouldn't worry too much about it. Kouh's an odd town, but it's always been kind to wanderers."
He didn't bother asking how the guy knew he was a wanderer; his appearance answered that question. Instead, he focused on something a bit more important. "That's nice to hear. I'm Alfred, by the way."
Another laugh, this time coming with the extension of an arm. "Kiba. Though for future reference, it's a bit more normal to introduce yourself family name first."
Alfred winced but tried not to let it slow him down. "Ah, right. Evander Alfred then?"
"Yuuto Kiba. A pleasure to meet you, Evander."
He pursed his lips, trying not to hide his discomfort at being called his family name. His intent didn't much matter, as Kiba picked up on it almost immediately. "If you're not a fan of it, you can always ask the student council to contact administration and refer to you by a different last name outside legal necessity. Normally it's not something they'd do but… sometimes circumstances will make them a bit more sympathetic to the request."
The thought was touching, it really was. However, he couldn't exactly shake the feeling that doing so was kind of… wrong. He'd get used to it.
"By the way, what room are you? If you don't mind me asking."
Attempting to answer immediately, Alfred embarrassingly realized that he had actually forgotten the room number. Lifting his letter back into view, he gave a quick answer. "626. What about you?"
He didn't get an immediate answer, Kiba's focus too fixated on the letter to have heard him properly. It was odd, seeing his brow furrow in deep confusion at the sight of his letter. But like most odd things, Alfred was quick to brush it to the side. He was too used to the idea of strangeness to be all too disturbed by it.
"Hello?"
Kiba quickly snapped out of it, flashing a warm but more noticeably practiced smile. "Sorry, got lost in thought. I'm in 629, so I guess we're floormates!"
"Cool."
It was hard to match the blond's enthusiasm, though not because he didn't find the idea comforting in a way. He just wasn't a high energy person. Kiba seemed to get it, as he patted him on the back before beginning to walk down the hall away from where Alfred had just come from. "I have to meet with a friend soon, but I'll try and stop by tomorrow to see how you're doing."
"Thanks."
Kiba waved later as he left the hall, leaving Alfred to resume his quest to find his room. Well, to call it a quest at this point was disingenuous. It was only a dozen or so feet ahead of him. He opened it quietly, stepping inside as the door shut behind him.
As far as dorms went, it was nicer than he imagined. A sink and door to the private bathroom were to his left and right respectively, a solid ten by ten-foot room leading off of that with a single bed and a small fridge pushed in the corner. There was some furniture – a desk, chair, and dresser – but beyond that it was totally bare.
It was more than enough.
Alfred threw his duffel bag into the little closet area they provided, feeling several times more relaxed than he had been outside. Closing the blinds to his window, he lazily held his arm out and watched as a tendril shot from his jacket and turned on the lights.
"Sorry for keeping you cooped up Threat."
The jacket shifted more, two thicker tendrils crossing over one another before tilting away from him.
"I know, I know, but it was either that or I'd have to wear actual clothes and not you."
Both tendrils shot into the air, waving around frantically before one of them jabbed into his chest. He chuckled, enjoying his companions admittedly overdramatic reaction.
That was perhaps another thing that was unusual about him. For as long as he could remember (a rather short time admittedly) Threat had been bonded with him. He never really knew why, and it didn't seem to either, but it found itself satiated off of the natural (or unnatural) aura he let off. It was one of the first things that made him realize that questioning every odd occurrence that happened in life would just lead to headaches.
The second was a bit less enjoyable.
A faint red haze glowed around his hand, flickering wildly with the desire to move and act. It was quickly snuffed out as Threat wrapped its black tendrils around his hand, covering his hand down to his forearm in a maroon and black hash pattern. He didn't quite enjoy looking at it, the writhing black tendrils brushing against the open patches of maroon which reminded him of an old wound which refused to heal. It was visceral in that regard, and a sore reminder in others.
That little haze, though responsible for feeding Threat, had a few other unwanted side effects. It tended to bring out the negativity in people, usually only slightly at first but over time it just… it did more. It also made his own emotions more potent, strengthening off of them and then strengthening them in a continuous loop till he either got a hold of himself or he passed out. It was tough to get a handle the last two years, but he had to else…
He had to.
Allowing Threat to enjoy itself, Alfred busied himself with unpacking his sole duffel bag. There wasn't much inside that was noteworthy, but he took his time with it.
It was relaxing, to be honest.
… … …
Time passed too quickly for Alfred. He was nervous the morning of first classes, nervous walking to class, he was even nervous from first period all the way to lunch. He couldn't help it, having expected the other shoe to drop. It hadn't. If anything, things had gone better than he ever could have thought. People seemed eager to talk to him, excited to talk to him about the states and its pop culture. Some even seemed interested in him as a person, commenting on his hair or what he liked to do.
It was a little weird when one girl asked him about his foot size, but he wasn't going to question it. Besides, she seemed ecstatic when he told her. Looking back on it, most of the people talking to him were all women. He remembered something about the academy having once been an all-girl's school, but surely the disparity wasn't this big?
It probably didn't matter.
Alfred eventually found himself sitting beneath a tree in the courtyard, eating an onigiri he had gotten from the cafeteria. He munched on the rice ball, finding it surprisingly tasty as he scanned the campus for anything worth noting. Nothing much was there, to be fair, though his eyes did land on a forest on the edge of the campus.
It was expansive, going past as far as he could possibly see. Trying to peer through the forest didn't amount to any more to go off of, as the dense foliage made it impossibly dark even during the middle of the day. Not a single soul wandered anywhere close to it, and he could understand why. It was kind of unsettling.
Finishing the onigiri, he leaned back against the tree and-
Something crashed into a bush behind the tree, startling him as his head whipped around to see what was going on. His eyes landed on a head poking out of a bush, a panicked brunette girl locking eyes with him before glaring.
"Don't you dare snitch!"
"Wha-"
Her head vanished into the bush before he could question her, much less agree, leaving him little to do but look away in disbelief. He wasn't even afforded more than a brief few seconds before a horde of kendo-dressed women as they rushed to his area, sticks flailing around in the air angrily.
"YOU! HAVE YOU SEEN THAT- oh, hi~"
Their leader, a brunette with long hair and a red ribbon through her hair, changed her demeanor rather quickly upon meeting him. "You must be the transfer student. I'm Murayama, a pleasure to meet you."
"Evander. Nice to meet you."
He tried to keep his cool, unsure of how to handle the bush-person and the kendo squad at the same time. It didn't end up being that hard, however, as Murayama seemed far less interested in yelling than she had been moments prior.
"Thank you! Say, have you seen an annoying girl our age, say, two inches shorter than me and less pretty? Looks extremely desperate?"
The bush rustled angrily for a moment, though none of the kendo girls thought much of it.
"…I don't think I'd notice someone less pretty than you."
Alfred lied out of his ass, not sure what the bush-person had done to deserve this but not willing to put someone in what seemed like harm's way for it. He hoped to say something nice, distract the kendo girls from the bush and get them to move on. And it seemed to work, kind of. The girls behind Murayama whispered frantically amongst one another, a girl by her side with short light brown hair and a white band on her head taking more interest in the situation than even the others.
"Oh my, did you hear that Mur-"
The pommel of a kendo stick lodged itself into the girl's stomach, cutting her off as Murayama ignored the others and simply smiled. "Understandable. Well, if you do see her, give me a call. And if you don't, give me a call."
"I don't have-"
A sticky note was pushed to his chest, sticking to the jacket of his uniform. He looked at the note, wondering how she managed to write her number on it so quickly before folding it neatly and placing it in his pocket. "…Okay?"
"Okay!"
It was impressive how she managed to wrangle a whole murder of girls without so much as a wasted breath, dragging them away with a pep in her step. Looking at the note once again, he shrugged before adding it to his phone. Murayama must've really wanted to catch this bush-person, maybe he should give her a call then? It would be kinda rude not to after she trusted him with-
"Move the paper over, I can't see her number."
He crumpled the paper up immediately, elbow slamming against the tree as he purposefully missed hitting the bush-person's head. He stared at the bush-person, noting that they fit Murayama's description exactly. Especially the desperate part.
"Who are you?"
He had expected a quick answer, he really did. Unfortunately, he didn't get a quick answer. What he got was the bush-person jumping onto both feet, sticking her hand out with a peace sign, and shouting her name, title and occupation.
"I am Hyoudou Isami, Future Harem Queen and Futa Connoisseur!"
He had no idea what was so interesting about the Federal Unemployment Tax Act, but he wasn't going to judge that at least. "Why a harem?"
She looked at him as if he were insane, which felt like the opposite of what should have been happening in that situation. "Why not a harem?"
Several reasons came to mind. "Just seems like a lot of work."
Isami sat down, legs crossed as she thought about it. "I guess, though that's why I'd need a smart person in my harem. Someone to manage it all, maybe multiple someones."
Alfred briefly imagined having to talk to as many people as he did today for the rest of his life and shuddered. He didn't mind talking to people, but a lot of them? All the time? That was terrifying. He'd have to live up to each and every person's expectations, which might not even be realistic in the first place. And they'd whisper behind his back, because all people did that. They'd complain to each other that he wasn't doing enough, wasn't trying to help them hard enough. To please them. They wouldn't be happy. No matter what he did, they were never happy.
"How are you going to do that if nothing you ever do is going to convince them to love you?"
She frowned suddenly, brow furrowed in thought as her fingers tapped on her knee. "I… I dunno. To be honest, I'm not really good with people. They're just so complicated, you know?"
"Mhm."
"Like, what's the point in hiding what you want?"
"Modesty?"
"Bah! Makes no sense! If you want something, you've just got to go on with it!"
"Sounds dangerous."
"That's the part I'll think about later!"
He had only been partially invested in the conversation, not really understanding the want in the first place but not willing to rudely ignore her. So, when he saw her arm swing wide, he hadn't had the time to move to the side and let her hand miss his arm. instead, her knuckles collided head on with his bicep. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't.
To put into words what the brief tick of the cosmological clock that had passed between them was like, he couldn't. His brain just couldn't think fast enough, or long enough, to put it together. It was like, like if a single atom that made up the planet and its atmosphere appeared randomly in space and doubled every ten minutes. It was like watching that process happen before his eyes, the slow build before a sudden spike in presence, but all within the span of a moment that was too fast for a mind to conceptualize the feeling of contact happening in the first place. That feeling overwhelmed everything else, his senses dying as the metaphysical weight of it wormed its way through him before pulling back and allowing him to once more exist in its world.
He sat forward, mind asserting itself as fast as it could as Threat nearly fell back into its most basic state around it. He kept the creature intact, allowing little more than a slight tremble to affect the structure of his uniform while Threat recovered. He turned back to face Isami, a bead of sweat going down his forehead as she stared at her arm in a hypnotic state.
"What… was that?"
Her head turned up slowly, eyes unfocused as she stood up suddenly and jerkily. "I feel… I should go."
There was no point in stopping her, not when he could feel his own control over his power slipping as a consequence of the sudden contact. He pushed his hand into his pocket, using the control he had over the energy to push it towards his hand and into Threat. Tendrils latched onto him, draining the energy but not as quickly as he was producing it. A first, considering he wasn't feeling nearly emotionally heated enough to be producing this much.
It was an unusual occurrence. Strange, even. But not one worth thinking about. He couldn't afford to, not really. Strangeness made him anxious which lessened his control which made him more anxious and made his powers worse. He worked too hard to suppress them to lose it here. Not now.
Was there no denying that it was odd? Yes. But like most odd things, he brushed it to the side. He had to.
… … …
Alfred was nothing if not good at hiding his anxiety. It took practice, but he was good at it. He made it through the day a pep in his step, counting up to ten each time his left foot hit the floor, breathing in rhythm with every even number. He hummed along quietly to a song, tapping away with his thumb alongside the song in a carefully practiced 4/4 beat. He paid attention in class, taking note of five items in the room, four things he could feel, three things he could hear, two he could smell, and one thing he wanted to do later. Average things really.
The perk of not being known by many people is that their interest was always very shallow to begin with. They never asked hard questions or dug too deep. If he was a bit quieter than the rest? Maybe he was just nervous or shy about his Japanese. If he seemed a bit slower to react to what everyone else was saying? He was probably just processing the words in his head.
He cruised through the first day with ease like that, even talking to Kiba briefly before heading back to his dorm and vowing to spend the rest of the day getting work done and resting.
Only one of those things happened.
The moon hung high in the night sky right outside his window, mocking him as he glared at the stupid space rock with impotent rage. He was supposed to have been asleep by now, or at the very least sitting calmly in bed while scrolling idly on his phone. That never happened. Instead, he was blessed to be wide awake in the middle of the night while his body all but burnt up from the inside out.
Another downside to the energy which constantly wafted off of him. When he was calm and in control, the feeling was negligible. But in moments like this where he was still a bit anxious or just annoyed? The heat it let off as a byproduct became a bit more noticeable. What was worse was that for some reason, it refused to slow down much. The energy was pumping at a ridiculous rate, leaving him hot enough to sweat even with the fan turned on to max.
Trudging over to the sink, he went to turn the faucet on before yelping as a strong electric shock rushed out of his finger and into the handle. He shook his hand, and reached for it again before cursing to himself as it happened once more.
"Can't even splash water on my face."
It was then that he decided that going outside was the only solution to his plight, hoping that the cool night air would help his overheating problem. Besides, it was probably for the best that he left the dorm building to save whoever else lived in here the trouble of his aura. He wasn't sure if it could leak out of his dorm, but it was probably safer to be cautious.
Reaching out to grab the door handle, he paused a moment and squinted at the silver color of it. Giving a quick mental command to Threat, he waited until the symbiote formed a glove around his hand before grabbing the handle and opening the door.
Leaving the dorm, he made his way down the hallway and into the floor's common area. His eyes landed on the elevator, crunching the numbers to see how bad his odds were while standing inside a thick metal box. Not liking the number he came to, he chose the stairs, skipping two at a time until he was on the ground floor and then out of the building.
The air hit his face nicely, a good wind brushing his hair to the side as he wandered aimlessly from the dorm grounds. He didn't really have much of a plan for the walk, he didn't really have much of a plan for anything. Plans were a lot of work and trying to come up with a bunch of different variables to make sure a plan worked seemed… annoying at best. He preferred to wing it, working with what he had and going from there. It was easier, less complicated.
Frustratingly, everything about this situation was complicated.
Even now, Alfred had no clue where the letter from Kuoh Academy came from. He had found it stuffed in a backpack one day, all the way near the bottom of what had been a waterlogged bag. It had come out perfectly dry, not a crease on it or a stain to its name. Outside of the letter itself, the envelope had contained three things: a plane ticket, a passport, and an academy ID. Startling in every way, but it was a chance he hadn't wanted to waste. A chance to be known as anything but a walking omen.
He half expected it to end with his organs harvested at first.
The streets were dead silent as he walked through them. Another peculiarity, and one he was eager to ignore. He couldn't though. It contrasted how bustling Kuoh had been when he had first arrived, the officer workers, shoppers, even the preachers, all gone now. It was an almost perfect nothingness of sound, save for the whistling of the wind and the ringing of a bell.
A bell?
It was a quiet chime, nearly silent to his ear but still noticeable nonetheless. It was enough that he decided he wanted nothing to do with it and turned to head back the other way before realizing he had no idea where he came from. He had stopped at the intersection of a four-way street, and his turning around to look for the bell had disoriented him enough to throw into doubt his sense of direction.
"Shit."
His habit of losing himself in thought came back to bite him in the ass, and now it was up to him to try and figure out where he needed to go. In his momentary frustration, he blamed Japan's narrow streets as if he knew if this were America, he would have been run over before he could have even tried to look for the bell.
Taking the path closest to him, he hoped that he'd recognize some of the streets before realizing that none of the streets were labeled. The differences between here and the states hit him once more. There, the streets were named and addresses went by said streets. Here they typically weren't, and if you wanted to find anything then good luck.
In essence, he was effectively lost.
He started taking random paths whenever he could, simply going for whatever made the sound of the bell quieter. In spite of that, none of that seemed to stop the slow and steady rise of the chiming bell traveling along the air. It was as if the wind itself were fooling him, twisting the sounds around so as to confuse his attempt at escape into a near beeline path to the call.
Pulling out his phone, Alfred tried to use the map app on it to try and orient himself. Not that it worked, as he didn't have any cellular data and there wasn't anywhere he could leech Wi-Fi off of. He should've downloaded the map to his phone earlier.
Stuffing the phone into his pocket, he looked up with a grumble before freezing in place. The forest he had seen hours earlier stood before him, no more than fifty feet away. It was as if it had just appeared there, cutting off the roads abruptly and leaving several tall buildings next to nothing but green and malice. But the most striking thing was what lay just past the divide of the forest from the city.
A woman of unearthly beauty stood there, garbed in some sort of priestess attire as she swung an odd-looking bell. Her hair was long and dark enough to nearly blend into the shadows behind her perfectly, waving in the wind as her violet eyes regarded him curiously, an unsure tilt of the nod giving it an almost human appearance. That illusion was shattered not a moment later, as it grinned madly and beckoned him to come closer, backing up into the darkness of the forest. But even with it gone from his eyes, he could still feel its gaze heavy on him.
"Nuh uh."
He turned around immediately, intent on getting the hell away from the ghost lady of the forest. That was not to be, as just as he turned around his shoulder bumped into the body of some middle-aged man.
"What the-"
The man tried to walk past him, but Alfred grabbed onto his arm quickly in an effort to ask the guy a question. The man stopped moving, not just forward, but altogether. It was unnerving, enough that Alfred turned the guy's head to try and see his face.
"The hell?"
The face was completely lax, not a single movement of muscle anywhere to be seen. It was almost droopy the way his jaw gaped ever so slightly and cheeks hung without any tension to keep them taunt. It was the eyes that were the most distressing part: they were dazed beyond even fog, unfocused yet twitching in random directions even as the man's eyelids covered half of them. It was like he was sleepwalking somehow, just with his eyes partially open.
It wasn't a very reassuring sight. In fact, it was so unreassuring that Alfred let the man's arm go almost as soon as the head turned. The man continued walking, head slumping back forward as he disappeared into the forest.
"Poor bastard."
Turning away from the forest proved a bit more difficult than before, the man's dead-looking face popping back up every time he blinked. But turn away he did, and this time he got a few feet away from the forest when the next person came shuffling around the corner. It was an old woman this time, different in every way from the other guy but with the same dead look.
He watched the woman enter the forest, lips set in a tight line as he looked away from the forest and placed some pressure on his front foot. He held that position for a while, hands clenched as he gave the street before him a heated glare.
"…Shit."
Stomping angrily towards the forest, Alfred kept count of each of his steps and steadied his breaths as he breached the forest's domain and wandered deeper inside. The bell continued to chime, though now there seemed to be an almost amused quality to its ringing. As if whatever creature was holding it could see his every movement and expression.
That was a possibility, to be frank.
It was not a very fast walk, as roots of the many trees were gnarled and tended to get in the way of his feet. There were more than a few times where he had to step over a particularly tall bit of root, boot pressing down on the thick moss on the other side which covered the forest floor. Every now and again he could see the skittering of what he hoped was just some kind of bug, or perhaps the wiggling of a mushroom. It could have been either, or neither.
He would eventually come to a sort of clearing just before a massive lake, the moon acting as a massive silver crown to some large building of sorts on the far side of the lake. It was mesmerizing, the way the moonlight bounced off the crystal clear water, but could not distract him from the dozen or so people standing around like puppets waiting for command.
"Well, aren't you an interesting specimen."
His head whipped around, arms shooting up into a defensive position as a whisper carried all around him. Alfred grit his teeth, calming himself the best he could even as the people around him began to fidget unnaturally. "What are you?"
The voice laughed, a melodic thing which served no purpose but to stress him further. "Not even starting with who? How uncouth."
Everyone around him suddenly fell to their knees, hands to their heads as they groaned pitifully. He knelt to someone nearby, the middle-aged man he had seen before, and watched as conflict burned on his face even as his eyes remained closed.
"What are you doing to them?"
"Testing them."
There was no understanding what that meant, not until one of the people there suddenly launched forward and began to attack the ground beneath them with a murderous rage. They slammed their fist into the ground, twisting it almost as if they had a knife in hand before stopping. They cried suddenly, weeping quietly in the dark before their entire body spasmed upwards before going limp and falling to the ground.
The ground beneath him shifted in feeling in that moment, the air growing heavier as something else began to weigh down on it. He watched as the creature walked in from the edge of his vision, stopping by the body and breathing it in. It smiled widely, a twisted thing full of teeth as her presence seemed to get stronger by an almost imperceptible amount.
"Did you just… eat his soul?"
The monster laughed, as if it had heard that same question a hundred times before. "Nothing so silly. I simply devoured the sin from his soul."
Alfred's hand clenched as an idea came to mind, the long hours of forced bible reading his foster parents had made him go through coming back to him in that moment. "Are you some kind of Japanese demon?"
That seemed to be right, or at the very least close enough. The monster's eyes gleamed as it cooed at him, like a parent congratulating a child for guessing the obvious answer. "A devil to be specific, but not a bad guess at all, human."
It spoke of his kind with an almost derogatory slant, as if humans were little more than a stain on her foot.
"So, you're a monster then."
In spite of how apt the title felt, the devil must've felt differently. Its smile became strained as its once patronizing eyes grew wrathful. "I suppose I am, considering that's all you humans will ever see. Anything different than you is a monster, after all."
That was far from what he meant, but before he could try and specify what he meant, the devil was in front of him with malicious glee in her grin. "Let me show you a monster."
Two wings the same pitch black as her hair burst into existence behind her, large and batlike with spiny protrusions where bone would be. Despite the devil being shorter than him, the wings made her seem towering from his own eyes, enough to put a momentary lapse on his self-control.
Several of the innocents around him suddenly began to ravage the ground in front of them, whether it be with murderous or lustful intent, acting mad and without any semblance of rationality as they frothed at the mouth. Alfred cursed at himself, quickly trying to get himself back under control before any more damage could occur.
He was much too slow.
"You."
Weightless surrounded him before his back was suddenly slammed up against a tree, a hand around his neck as the devil glared at him. The air felt heavy once more, and once again he could feel the devil growing stronger.
"You've ruined the sanctity of my test."
The irony in a devil being enraged over the sanctity of anything was not lost on him, but the sharp glint of her teeth as she all but growled her disdain at him dissuaded him from thinking on it further.
"N-Not… my… fault."
It was hard to speak with his throat being nearly crushed in the devil's grasp, and even as he mustered the effort, he found himself realizing that it would matter little. The devil before him was livid, and there was nothing he could do to change that.
"No, it never is, is it? Humans always want to blame anyone but themselves, never willing to take responsibility for their actions. But I know better, I know how selfish you little things are."
She pulled him out of the tree, tossing him away from her ritual with a strength unbefitting of her frame. His body rolled and tumbled, bouncing off of the roots roughly before eventually stopping as a particularly tall bit of root caught him as gently as hard wood could.
He groaned, flesh bruised and bones likely fractured in places he had never thought of before. He tried to get back up in spite of it, eager to escape the situation before it was too late.
"Look at you, wanting to run like a coward."
The sadistic voice of the devil was his only warning, his arm raising in an attempt to defend himself. It did little to help, as her next hit shattered his forearm and sent him careening into the direct path of a tree.
He gasped, blood dripping from his lips from him accidentally biting his tongue too hard. His chest hurt like hell, the spiky bits of broken rib poking into his lungs every time he tried to breathe. He could feel the bones in his forearm hitting the cool air, his unfortunate tumble forcing his arm into an angle bad enough for the shattered bone to pierce the meat of his arm. Every flash of pain made his brain swim, something wet leaking down his neck as his vision blurred between a forest and a home.
And still the devil taunted him.
"What's the plan now? Going to beg for your life? I'm afraid I'm not feeling merciful, and HE is never listening."
The devil strolled forward with a relaxed gait, obscured by both the shadows and his cloudy vision. He could feel his eyes blinking, but he could always see her walking forward. One step on moss, the other on a hardwood floor. A knife was in her hands, from where he could never guess, and the anger in her voice as she screamed at him seemed much too real.
"IT WAS YOU! YOU MADE ME DO THIS! HIS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS, NOT MINE!"
It was on his hands. How could it not be? He was trying to stem the bleeding, to keep dad alive. But she had the knife, she had the splatter of guilt across her dress. He hadn't done anything, he hadn't done a single fucking thing.
"YOUR HANDS!"
He had to run, to get out of there somehow. Alfred tried to stand, but his limbs failed him. He could barely move, much less run. He tried to ignore it, to shut his eyes and pretend it wasn't happening, but he could still hear her.
"IT WAS YOU!"
It wasn't, it wasn't. He never meant for anything to happen, he was just a kid. Barely even a teenager. How was he supposed to know that his powers could do this? Could make someone so angry?
"YOU MADE ME DO IT!"
He had just thought it was the stress. Dad worked all day, and she stayed at home with a child who could scarcely remember his own name. He hadn't put two and two together until much later, and by then it was too late. But that didn't mean-
"YOUR FAULT!"
No, no no no no no! He didn't mean to, he didn't want to! If he had known what would have happened, he would have left it alone! He hadn't wanted any of this to happen, he was just curious! It wasn't him! It wasn't his fault!
She grabbed him by the neck, knife forgotten as she strangled him with all her might. He gasped, struggling against her grip as she screamed at him from every direction at once. He stared at her face, blurred and misshapen, and for a moment he stopped trying altogether. He couldn't run away from this, he couldn't ignore it like everything else. What else could he do other than just go limp and accept his fate?
His vision went dark, and for a moment he was accepting of it. Really, he was. But a moment was nothing in the face of the infinite last breath before death, and as that final breath came, he realized he had a third option.
He could fight back.
The blood in his veins boiled to a hot magma as a bloody scream tore its way through his throat, the bones in his arm being shunted back into place as he grabbed the woman above him and threw her away from him. His skin burned a hot red as he grasped the moss covering the ground, mind clearing as electricity sparked and electrocuted him every time he breathed.
Tendrils wrapped around him, small fibrous things which formed a sort of insulating suit of black and tortured red. Fingers turned to claws as they dug through the dirt, the pain dying down as Threat established itself around him and began to absorb the excess energy from his body to protect him from the small bursts of electricity.
He stumbled forward, vision sharpening as he glared at the devil through the mask covering his face. The muscles in his body tensed with newfound strength as she hovered above the ground, eyes narrowed as she analyzed him.
"I couldn't even sense the familiar. Though I suppose you being a walking generator of borderline radioactive magic would make anything hard to sense."
Alfred put little thought into her words, too pissed off to care as he lunged at her with a snarl. She avoided his clumsy first shot with a simple pivot to the left, priestess dress barely moving as she dodged his second and third slash.
"Look at you, growling and snarling like some sort of beast."
Her words meant nothing to his red-hazed glare, a thick tendril shooting out of the palm of his hand and just barely missing her face as it instead crashed into a tree.
"Clumsy too. Like some sort of little berserker rather than-"
His body lurched forward, cutting her gloating off as he used the tendril to yank himself forward and tackle her into a tree. She grunted, eyes narrowing as yellow lightning sparked around her eyes.
"Know your place!"
A massive bolt of lightning struck his chest, throwing him away from her. He took the hit well, however, body twisting in the air as he landed with one hand on the ground while his toes dug into the moss to keep him balanced.
"Seems to me that you need a little punishment now."
The devil floated above him, lightning crackling around her hands as she began to hurl several bolts of it in his direction. Instinct carried him as he pushed off the ground and shot another tendril to a tree, using it as a grappling hook to swing around the forest and avoid her strikes. Landing on the rough bark of a particularly old tree, Alfred found himself sticking to the side of it before launching himself away as another bolt rendered it to splinters.
"Stay still for me, would you? It'll only hurt a lot."
Ignoring the teasing of the devil, Alfred swung around a tree and used the momentum to launch himself at her feet first. His heels collided with the devil, sending her to the ground while he stood over her. She spit on the ground beside her, face covered in dirt as she glared at him. "Can't even let me have a little fun, can you?"
He said nothing, flaring his claws as he went to drive his hand through her chest. She scoffed, hand raised as smaller streaks of lightning burst from her fingertips and hit him square in the chest.
"HRGH!"
No matter how good Threat was at insulating his own electrical problems, it did little but defend against the onslaught of the devil's lightning. In a reversal of fortune, she now stood over him. "I don't know what you are, but you've caused enough problems. Die most painfully for me, 'kay?"
Her serious voice was betrayed by the euphoric look on her face, cheeks red as she indulged herself in electrocuting him a little longer. It was an annoying expression, one that outdid the pain in pissing him off as he tried to ignore the lightning jumping through his muscles and get to his feet. He almost got there, foot on the ground pushing himself off, when the power behind her attack doubled and he fell to his knees.
"Mmmm, struggle harder for me~"
Nothing would satisfy him more than wiping that stupid look off of her face, and it was that desire which drove him to once more get to his feet. The lightning bounced from muscle to muscle, the contractions making it near impossible to move properly but still he tried. He tried as he glared at her with all his hate, the power in his chest pumping harder in response to his rising anger.
"Eh? What are you-"
Confusion marred her expression for the briefest moment before shock, as a red electrical charge began to develop across his arms and chest. His eyes never left hers, even as he lifted his knee to plant his foot in the ground and threw everything he had forward.
Yellow and red flashed against each other, each containing force strong enough to fry a normal person. They collided several times in the span of a second, neither moving as quickly as true lightning but each certainly moving fast enough for the layman to call it as such. All the force on both sides hit each other at full speed, and with neither giving in they did the second-best thing.
They exploded.
Both Alfred and the devil found themselves being launched back, with Alfred landing in a tree fairly close by while she tumbled a little further. His entire body ached, limbs heavy as the core in his chest felt sore from the overexertion. She, on the other hand, looked little more than annoyed at the blast as dirt smeared her face and clothes while twigs and leaves stuck out of her hair.
Shit.
Pushing off of the tree, Alfred readied himself to go another round when a sudden ray of light forced him to raise his hand and squint. He looked between the gaps in his fingers and watched the day begin to break through the gaps in the forest.
"What poor timing."
The devil huffed to herself as the sun rose, attempting to appear dignified despite the grime covering her. "We'll have to continue this game another time, luckily for you. But don't worry, I won't be far away~"
A circle of magic appeared beneath her feet, spinning in a circle before she vanished in a flash of magic. Magic. It was a thing, like, a proper thing. The realization (alongside the exhaustion) made him fall to his knees as the last however long it was actually settled in his mind. Devils exist, as in plural, which probably meant angels and whatever else existed in bible stuff. And magic was an actual thing. He had magic, not just some random superpower or curse.
He also had school in like, two hours.
"Fuuuuck."
With more effort than he was inclined to admit, Alfred got off his knees and began to walk towards where he believed Kuoh was. He was beaten, he was tired, and he was… emotionally unsure of a lot of things.
That was going to be a theme going forward, he was certain of it.
… … …
I've decided to lean into the supernatural part of the, well, supernatural. In my personal opinion, the DxD world tends to feel a bit too clean, in spite of several bits of lore which should make it a bit grimmer in tone. I get why, but still, kinda wack. I was also quite a bit more careful this time around with Akeno being an antagonist, and I think that I left enough subtext to give an idea as to her motivations and what not. Also, I changed some lore around so devils can "eat" sin. I thought it'd be cool and give a more inhuman vibe to them which I wanted. Devil's shouldn't feel like reflavored humans, after all. They're a completely different creature with a different culture and values, so there should be parts of their culture that don't quite vibe with human sensibilities. So yeah.
I really wish I had more to say at this exact point, but I really don't. I think I structured this chapter decently well and combined the freak-out of the old chapter three with the fight at the end of chapter one to create a much less angst-fueled rush of momentum and still allowing a mildly lighthearted tone to be carried out in the next chapter which I'm probably going to start writing as soon as this one goes out.
This has been A Decent Hoonter, and this chapter is about 3.5k words longer than I thought it would be.
QQ to FF Hoonter Note: This has been crossposted from QQ, and is actually the second version of a story I started that was sort of dead after chapter 3 cause I fucked it and ended up rewriting to much better results. I started this rewrite February 16th, 2024 and have posted the 8 chapters I have since written to FF on February 23, 2024. Yes, I have written eight chapters in eight days totally a length of roughly 64k words. I am uncertifiably insane.