Leveling-Up Dragon King 2 (Saji SI, Highschool DXD)

Japan's waste management is strictly managed for the most part. It makes it both easier and harder for me to get things done. Why is that so?

For me, the best part of Japan's trash collection policies is how organized the trash can be and how it's all gathered together ripe for the pickings. This saves me a lot of time, as I won't have to simply pray and hope for some useful materials during any random searches.

On the down side, trash collection time varies, it can be anything from 8:00am to 10:00am. Most people get up very early or take it out the night before. This is inconvenient for me as it means that I need to play it safe to make sure I don't get caught and sneak out of my home around 2 to 5 am to be on the safe side.

Waste not, want not.

I couldn't let all the potential experiment materials and the free power provided by thrown away food go to waste. It's a shocking anomaly, but Japan already trashes millions of tons of perfectly edible food each year while, and if food like that goes to waste while millions of children under the poverty line in this country don't have enough to eat, then I will damn well make sure I put all the waste to good use.

Of course, "good use" equals "my use", when it comes to discarded items.

I had long familiarized myself of the trash collection dates for my local community and the closest large supermarket. With that in mind, twice a week, I can easily refill my stores of energy and bury away my materials in a secret spot of mind.

Absorption Line can be very useful for landscaping once the lines are sharpened enough to penetrate through earth, thanks to all my multi-tasking and remote control training, I can even use my multiple lines as a main form of attack… and as a shovel.

Wow, Sacred Gears are so useful!

"Okay, last haul before summer break. Let's do this."

A few of my lines wrapped around the sacks of trash while my newly placed Absorption Line shooters on my both sides of my hips shot out another a single line each, using it's sticky properties to latch onto the sides of the alleyway.

Diverting my reserve stores of power to the other side of those shooters, I released them as kinetic energy to propel and fling myself into the sky with my trash, no… treasure, in tow.

The rest of my lines were levitating and rotating itself like a spherical shield around me with the specific goal of absorbing sound energy in order to reduce the travel noise I made.

"Sasageyo! Sasageyo!" I couldn't help myself as I repeated the technique to do some real 3-D manoeuvre gear action.

After calming down a bit, I quickly made my way to my secret spot near home, and used my lines to swiftly move things about. I quickly placed most of the experiment material into my underground stash before covering it back up with the patch of ground.

As for the others, I hummed a tune as I absorbed the piles of food compost until they were utterly drained and reduced to ash, before moving on to absorbing the meat and vegetables that couldn't be sold in the same manner.

When I felt that my I reached the limit of how much spare power I could store, I redistributed the actively absorbed power to all the many sources of "power" that my body held.

Anything from my body integrity (fixing fatique and illnesses), to my physical energies (Life Force, that could be manifested as Touki with a bit more training), spiritual energies (like mana) and up to my life span in that order of priority.

I could barely impact my life span and the other more conceptual forces so I prioritized them the least until I could improve on all the other aspects of my power or reach some breakthrough.

Over the past few months of this first semester, I had gotten good at manipulating my life force for internal use, with a bit of external use that could be passable Touki after I train more.

Through constant recycling of my internal mana through Absorption Line, specifically though controlled feeding and replenishment of my reserves, I had grown my mana supply until it was a few times larger, although I still haven't found out how to use it yet.

I wasn't born a magical creature or a denizen of the supernatural world where magic or some natural racial energy is part of their being. So supernatural strength, speed and senses at birth wasn't a thing for humans like myself.

At the present, my only working source of superhuman strength and speed is through training (with Absorption Line recovery and enhancements increasing my gains tremendously). And while I am much stronger than any average run of the mill adult has any right to be, I'm still woefully below what's needed to even survive against a newly reincarnated single pawn devil.

Hopefully, by the time I reach canon in about 4 years time, I would have grown strong enough to pull off some Hero Faction tier stuff.

… After about half an hour of burning off a bit more excess power through some self-injury driven training, I took a small pile of cleaned "trash" back home, sneaking back into the window by using my line to pull myself right back to my bedroom.

Part of my new haul included an old video camera. Great, now then, time to see if I can selectively drain "data" or if I'll end up with "Video" powers like inFAMOUS.

Summer exams were over and summer vacation was about to begin.

So far, I managed to survive school without incident.

"That's the kid!" "Teach him a lesson!" "Yaaaaaah!"

I sighed in unending disappointment as I blocked and parried the attacks from my assailants in front of the school gate.

They were the latest delinquents from some high school who came here to attack me for several minutes until they tired out. This pattern has been repeated time and time again without a single hit being landed upon me, due to… well, I am rather good at self-defense.

Thankfully, my parents had never been called over these incidents since no one technically gets hurt.

It all started when I just had to be a decent guy and told some high school boys to back off from harassing some female students, then of course, in Japanese anime / light novel tradition they decided to get violent.

As someone that didn't intend to get a black mark or be particularly noticeable by kicking some ass, I simply blocked and parried most of their attacks without causing harm directly while repeatedly pleading with them to stop the senseless violence.

The situation was resolved when a policeman came by and took some statements, I got off scot free since I hadn't caused any harm (it helped to have witnesses that backed me up), but unfortunately, things… escalated in true Japanese "misunderstandings" fashion.

"As expected of the boss!" "16 minutes and 37 seconds." "There's 14 of them this time so that's 54 seconds each until they gave up."

What a waste of time…. Wait, what the fuck, are they placing bets on how long it will take until the latest group stops attacking me?

Assholes.

Well, I guess that's to be expected. I didn't really have any friends in middle school.

Pretty much everyone thought I was a delinquent due to my blonde hair, or at least, they believed I had delinquent-like tendencies despite knowing that I was the smartest kid in school in addition to knowing the actual story of how this all started.

I'm really starting to think that this is due to whatever… field, is generated, by our resident speshul OC.

If he's not some Gary Stu or a regular dark edgy OC then he's at least a supernatural being whose constant information manipulation magic is somehow fucking up my reputation by screwing with everyone's logic processing capabilities!

Seriously? Fucking really?

The kid that looks like a high school bodybuilder on steroids has white and black "natural" hair colors parted right in the middle isn't a delinquent? Or at least a suspected trouble maker?

Blue eyes on the left, red eyes on the right, red tribal like tattoos on his back (as revealed in swimming classes) somehow make the girls go crazy despite all the Otaku and Yakuza connections?!

What the actual fuck?

If he's putting on a "this is normal, I'm not a troublemaking delinquent" field around himself… then I suspect that the scrutiny or impressions that people should be having about him are being transferred to me due to some unknown criteria or cultural biases being taken into account by this "information field"… in a completely messed up and inconsistent manner.

My SAN meter is literally on free fall right now… has been at free fall since the start of the semester, and I've just discovered how big negative numbers can really go.

"Well, at least I can be happy about getting the top score in school."

One of the perks about being reincarnated is that my IQ level seemed to be boosted to an extent. It wasn't a straight up IQ number added onto Saji's canon average IQ (based on comparisons to Issei and other LN MC's), but rather, just a slight boost to the point where I can be considered a prodigy.

Not a Super High School Level Genius. I wasn't going to make a doomsday device or anything.

Concepts and subjects that I once thought was too hard to me in my previous life simply became manageable for me so long as I put in some moderate effort. That's about it. I still have to put in a fuck ton of effort to "git gud" in anything.

… Of course, that's not the main reason why I'm getting the top score when the exam results come out after summer break.

No, the main reason, is that this "Kaizer-sama" (as called by his female admirers) deliberately gets 75% in all his tests, in all subjects, without fail.

He's like the Classroom of the Elite's 50% man, but at 75%.

And absolutely no one gives him shit for it! Like, no one!

The teacher's don't even tell him to try harder and they love him. The girls all fawn over him while the rest of the male population seethes in impotent jealousy and admiration at the same time.

Absolutely unbelievable!

This is madness!

Thank god that I'm going to see my grandparents from my mother's side in the United Kingdom over the summer break.

If I have to stay in this country for another month without a reprieve I'm going to go insane.

You know what, just give me my Naruto-in-name-only, or Harry-in-name-only… it can't be as bad as… as this. Hell, just give me a Shirou. I would like a nice sword guy that would save my ass rather than all of this crap.

Breathe… keep calm… just a few more days…

Plane rides still suck as much ass today as it did in my previous life.

It could have been worse, however, if there were more babies and younglings on the plane. I count myself fortunate that my grandparents on my father's side were more than happy to take care of my two year old twin siblings.

Canterbury was a nice place to visit. My grandparents were surprised at me speaking in English as if it were my first language, my father who could only speak broken English came to rely on me as a translator, and my mother was pleasantly surprised and very proud of me.

We spent a nice long relaxing week in the quiet town. I also taught my new grandparents how to use Skype and various other technologies, I think I will be getting some call from them at some point, they seem to be have appointed me as their new favorite grandchild.

Mostly because everyone else was a disappointment.

For our last few days in the UK, my parents and I went to stay in London to get some shopping and sightseeing done.

That was when the bad feelings started to come back to me in full force.

I kept a close eye on my parents and our surroundings, looking for anything suspicious, and found nothing.

And then I read the local newspapers and heard about some local serial killer killing people at night, all of the victims were middle-aged Asian males.

All of it took place in London, and every Friday without fail for the past two months, there would be someone that was knifed in the gut and dropped off a high-rise building to fall to their death.

It was utterly bizarre. And people simply accepted it.

What the fuck? Why aren't people more terrified? Are they all thinking that "it won't be me, it'll be someone else" every Friday night when they go out for a fucking drink?

"Here's 50 Pounds, go treat yourself to something Genshirou, you earned it. Your mother and I are going to have a dinner date at Duck & Waffle." My father pointed at Heron Tower, the tallest building in the City of London financial district.

I was screaming in my head.

Obviously, as always, they didn't fucking listen to me when I started talking about how their lives were in danger and that I had a bad feeling about this. They thought I was being a cute and concerned son.

Realizing that I wasn't getting anywhere, and that I wasn't willing to hurt them to keep them safe, I smiled and played along until they left. After that, I quickly put on a hoodie I bought at a store earlier in our trip, and stalked them all the way to the restaurant on the 40th floor of the 46th floor high tower.

Unfortunately, I couldn't stay on the floor since there was no real place to hide myself from the public, so I was forced to head back to the ground floor by the scenic elevator that I took to come up from there.

Okay, they should be safe if they stay within public view, so that's fine…

Oh shit, what if they went to the bathroom?

I made some calculations based on the few observations I had on my father's toilet breaks whenever we ate at a restaurant, and went back up the lift after circling the tower grounds for about two hours.

The bad feeling became a consistent buzzing noise in my head.

I could barely prevent myself from manifesting Absorption Line right there and then. I don't know why, but for some reason, I felt a call to go… somewhere.

And that somewhere, so happened to coincide with my father excusing himself to go to the restaurant's bathroom, I followed closely behind.

As the door opened, we both paused to note the light malfunctioning briefly, flickering on and off. My father continued on even as I stared, in both confusion and horror as the shadows created by the light began to move in unnatural ways, the buzzing in my head became louder and I quickly brought out Absorption Line.

I didn't know what came over me, but I quickly shot myself forward, darted around my father and got in front of him… just in time for my shoulder to be caught by a shadow.

A shadow deeper and darker than I had ever seen before.

It felt as if a human hand had grabbed my shoulder, the sensation was brief but familiar, but I could recognize the energy even without one of my lines covering my body.

The aura was nearly the same as my own Sacred Gear's.

In that quarter of a second when I was grabbed and I recognized that energy, I had been pulled forward into the wall, enveloped by darkness and when I saw the light again, I was falling.

Free falling from well over 500 feet high off the ground.

"Haah! Huwah?! What the fuc-"

Something reached for me and it was only thanks to my reflexes that I managed to twist myself with transferred kinetic energy to catch the arm about to drive a knife into my gut.

"Haaaaahahahaaaaa!" The shadowy monster clad in a black cackled as it attempted to stab me with another knife that whipped around it's side by a shadowy tendril.

My bright blue line severed the tendril before it could finish it's move.

"Eeah?!" It shrieked!

"Two can play at that game." I growled and kicked the thing off me, shooting lines at the building to pull me back to it, the thing followed me even as I used the sticky lines to stand sideways on the tower walls.

I looked up at the creature staring down at me, it's figure still hidden by the black clothes. Upon closer inspection, I could see a human-like shaped head… although, I'm pretty sure there were flickering black flames that made up it's lower jaw.

"There can only… be one…" It rasped as it pointed a black sharp talon-like shadow construct at me, oh, that's it's hand. "It won't… be you…"

"Oh, I don't think so." I narrowed my eyes at it, directed more of my lines to the building before letting myself drop about a dozen meters, then I focused on the lines so that it would pull me up at high speeds.

Right at the peak of my launch, I propelled myself further with converted kinetic energy, shooting myself at high speeds up the building and at the creature.

Crashing into it only shocked it for a moment before it became a formless shadow, seemingly melding with the tiny shadows in between the tower floors before appearing at random spots, striking me as I ascended up the tower.

I defended myself to the best of my abilities, sometimes, the sharp shadow tendrils got through my defense and gave me some shallow cuts. In the end, however, the creature couldn't stop me from climbing my way up the tower to reach a place where I wouldn't be at risk of falling to an imminent death.

At least now I only have a risk of falling off the tower, which is an improvement.

I quickly put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Sacred Gear users can go mad when their artifacts are awakened, the aura of this creature was similar to my own, it's abilities revolve around shadows… it's a Vritra Sacred Gear.

Vritra the Prison Dragon King, one of the most troublesome Evil Dragons due to his various abilities. Four abilities are not enough to be troublesome.

Absorption Line, Shadow Prison, Delete Field and Black Blaze Flare.

When Vritra was exterminated and then sealed into Sacred Gears, he had his soul split into many layers. Because of that, there are many Vritra-type Sacred Gear possessors. But if you were to group them, those four made up the main "types" that they could generally be grouped up as.

That's all, they were simply broad classifications. Every possessor had different and varied abilities. There were more than just four Vritra-type Sacred Gear possessors, his soul was chopped up like lettuce and I only had a part from one particular layer.

Vritra had many troublesome abilities that he developed from a handful of basic abilities that he enhanced and mastered to the point where they became deadly, not just in power, but in it's endless applications.

And now, just one possibility of how his power could develop, was standing before me as my enemy.

I layered the roof of the tower with threads, a few lines split into countless and nearly invisible tiny threads, through this, I could spread my awareness and influence all across the area.

Even as the mad man reappeared from the shadows, I could feel him coming and react accordingly, countering his attacks much easier than before by virtue of sensing where he was at any given time.

My enemy was tiring.

His last ditch attempt to fell me with a hundred shadow spikes from the ground failed as my lines acted like additional appendages, just like Doctor Octopus's robotic arms, and lifted me up in the air just in time to avoid the attack.

One of my lines acting as a long leg moved up upon my command, and then stabbed down at the exhausted enemy as if it were finishing off a wounded prey.

And then I began to absorb the rest of the maddened Sacred Gear user's power.

It was over.

Or was it?

I lowered myself back down to the roof and went up to the assailant, removing his face coverings only to see that half of his face was barely flesh at all. In fact, it looked like part of his body was replaced by the shadowy substance made by the Sacred Gear… which made me wonder what the fuck happened to him…

Removing a few more of the coverings showed that all four limbs were in the same state. Did someone just high-grounded him and turned him into a Vader? Poor guy.

As I drained enough power from him to keep him incapacitated, I reached for his life force and found it to be woefully dim. I knew then and there that he near death.

Could his Sacred Gear be… in some incomplete Balance Breaker mode to preserve his life, only to drain the rest of his life force in order to maintain this state? Why the killing? Did he have some small bit of Absorption Line powers in him that let him compensate for his shortened life span by draining it from others?

Why just middle-aged Asian men? Is he actually a psycho killer? Or is it because whoever did this to him looked a lot like this targets?

I was just speculating over too much that I couldn't possibly know.

I calmed myself to focus on the here and now.

Feeling compassion for him, I pulled a line to the spot above my heart and stuck it there. I pulled on my own life force and attempted to transfer it to him, only for the flow to suddenly reverse itself!

My life force rushed back from my Sacred Gear and back to my own body.

Stupid. Why did I think it was that easy?

I couldn't "understand" his life force enough to convert my own life force into something compatible enough. There just wasn't enough time for me to do the required adjustments.

I tried to pump back power to maintain his shadow limbs, but his life force began to decrease even with that, and so I decided that it was pointless and decided to cut my losses.

Resolving myself to be with him until he dies, I simply sat there with the man even as the shadowy appendages faded into nothing, leaving behind a limbless broken husk of a man.

He stirred, turning his head through the pain to look at me, for one last time.

In a show of surprising strength and clarity, he told me to "take it" and thanked me for stopping him.

It was… odd. I still felt completely helpless despite coming out of this alive. So hearing this is… I'm still numb to it all.

A small shadow tentacle reached from his body and attached itself to one of my Absorption Line heads.

"Please…"

Following my gut feeling, I agreed to his wishes and pulled.

There wasn't much to take, it was like I was trying to drink a near empty cup of juice with a straw. A tiny sliver of liquid and some powdery like substance remained, but I couldn't reach it.

An image came to my mind. There was a chocolate drink and at the bottom of it was some undissolved chocolate powder mix, I never wanted that sort of thing to go to waste, and I would just pour a tiny bit of hot water…

I pushed some of my power into him, directed at the last embers of what was there in his own power, and then I pulled.

And I understood.

A derivative of Shadow Prison, another sliver of Vritra's soul, as he lingered on in the realm of the living I managed to reach deep into his own Sacred Gear and pull on it's core. The power I pushed into him became imprinted with the functions of his Sacred Gear and when I pulled it back into me, the small piece of Vritra's soul came along for the ride.

What I was doing is similar to what Yhwach did in Bleach but without the creepy soul pieces implanted in people.

His Sacred Gear was a bit of a grab-bag, at least, it became so after ending up in an incomplete balance breaker state that pulled on Vritra's memories of his other abilities in order to empower him with abilities that wasn't part of the Sacred Gear's original functions.

I held the man's… shoulder, as he began to weaken for the last time.

"Thank… you…"

There was nothing he needed to thank me for. Honestly, he should be raging at me for stopping him, he should have been shouting about having vengeance or…

… that's enough. I don't know enough, or anything at all, in order to just assume his past or what had happened to him.

I just had to be happy for him. I had to smile and believe that he died relieved of his pain.

"Shadow Rider." I sunk into the shadows, becoming an abyssal umbra that drained the light around myself. I fed upon it, rejuvenating my "body" even in this shadow form, then I moved down the building through the shadows.

My ability was far from the outright teleportation that the dying man had displayed at times, but it got the job done, and I evaded the eyes of the people as I reached somewhere near where my family stayed.

I dumped the bloodied and damaged hoodie unto the ground and transferred heat energy to it, setting it on fire so that I wouldn't leave DNA around that could be used for scrying or modern identification.

My parents returned home safe and sound. As far as they know, I had gotten a quick dinner and fell asleep on the sofa waiting for them to come back.

We returned to Japan two days later.

I still had trouble making sense of what had just happened. It was the first time I had actually deliberately hurt a man and… allowed someone to die. I knew that I would be doing so for, well, actual life threatening self-defense situations at some point, but I still wasn't prepared to process the aftermath at all.

Would all of my life be like this? It would be worse... because there's no way all of my enemies are going to end up pitiful enough to mercy kill, or outright evil enough that I could say to myself that I did what I had to do.

Sacred Gear users wouldn't have peaceful boring lives, I'm pretty sure history and canon events were pretty clear on that.

So what was I to do about this? Could I just accept this?

Keeping myself alive at all costs isn't something I could just accept as a reason to continue as I am. There are plenty of stories and examples where people like that turn out for the worse.

If that is so? Then what is worth fighting for? What is important to me outside of my own life?

I stared at my calendar back at home, looking at how many more days of summer vacation that I had, and thought about how much more time I had until I became a high school student.

I have to find the answer to my question soon. I have the strangest feeling that fighting Vritra Sacred Gear users is somehow going to be a more common occurrence. And I do not want to end up hesitating in future fights.

I decided to set some time aside each day to reflect upon my life and actions, hopefully, I will be able to reach some answers at some point.

Now then, back to training. I have a whole new set of abilities to master.

Oh boy… here we go again.