I want to thank Duane Sharp for joining my Patreon. I would have liked to upload a chapter of the fic he follows, but since I don't know how, all I can do is thank him through this spam.
Okay, I used the first line so you can read it. If it's not too much trouble, could you go to my Patreon and donate for my breakfast? It's not an obligation, and I won't stop uploading; I'm just asking for a little help. Obviously, the Patreon is about five chapters ahead. Please be kind. Support this poor soul.
https://www.patreon.com/c/Panoli
-------
A few months had passed since the integration of the six Pokémon.
Lying on the black leather sofa in his gigantic dimensional laboratory, the fifteen-year-old boy stared at the vaulted ceiling in absolute silence. Beside him, Lala, now a slender Shiny Kirlia, slept peacefully, nestled against his left arm, passively sending him faint waves of psychic calm. But not even the comfort of his loyal blue fairy could dispel the dense fog that clouded his consciousness.
The painful absence of Tohka still weighed heavily on his chest, but tonight, a different and extremely strange disturbance began to shake the foundations of his latent divinity.
In his soul, where the concepts and vestiges of the pantheons his original gift had devoured in a now-extinct universe lay dormant, something creaked. The passive ability Pride vibrated with a dull, cold, and violent fury. It wasn't a direct offense against him personally, but a conceptual reaction: somewhere in the multiverse, the dignity of human existence was being trampled in such a vile, wretched, and abject way that Lunaris's gift demanded surgical retaliation.
Kaiju gently moved Lala's body aside, stood up, and walked toward the center of the steel hangar. His vertical scar above his right eye throbbed faintly in the dim light.
"An ordinary world... without magic, without ki, without cosmic warriors," Kaiju analyzed in his mind, closing his eyelid. His memory, that of a writer and otaku, the one that preserved the threads of stories from his previous life, suddenly identified the frequency of that distortion. The erogemanga universe of Metamorphosis (Emergence). One of the most repulsive, explicit, and morally destructive human tragedies ever written by human hands.
A grimace of deep disgust twisted his lips.
He extended his right hand. This time he didn't invoke the Turtle School's Ki, nor did he use purple telekinesis. He channeled the pure, raw, and majestic essence of his Divine Heritage. With a swift movement, he tore through three-dimensional space. A chasm of absolute black, bordered by a silvery, icy aura, opened in the middle of the laboratory.
Kaiju took a step forward and plunged into the conceptual void, leaving the city of Kuoh behind for a few hours.
...
The change of scenery was immediate.
Kaiju appeared standing on the rooftop of an apartment building in a mundane, gray, and depressing metropolis. The smell of smog, acid rain, and garbage hung in the air. There was no trace of mana, nor of active deities. It was a flat world, devoid of any mystical dimension. A mere blank sheet of paper on which a sadistic author had drawn misery.
Kaiju walked to the edge of the ledge and observed the streets illuminated by cheap neon lights. He didn't use his eyes to look at the physical plane. Instead, he released a fraction of his latent presence.
The night sky in the world of Emergence froze abruptly. The clouds stopped moving, and a deathly silence, heavy as lead, descended upon the entire city. The fabric of reality began to tremble, creaking under the pressure of a being that did not belong to its logical jurisdiction.
—Paper World... reveal your script —Kaiju ordered in a whisper charged with omnipresent authority.
By manifesting his pure divinity, the entire world was forced to bow before the original Author. Before the single sane eye of Kaiju, the timelines and conceptual pages of the universe unfolded in the air like threads of golden and black light. He saw the past, the present, and the tragic future that the original script held in store for an innocent young woman.
He saw Saki Yoshida.
He saw the girl with braids and glasses, shy and desperate to fit in when she entered high school, being manipulated, corrupted, dragged into the abyss of drugs, prostitution and the most degrading physical abuse, until she ended up dying alone on the dirty floor of a public bathroom, pregnant and broken, while imagining a happy life that she would never have.
—Not on my watch— Kaiju declared, his pupils flashing an immaculate, seething white. —Rewriting molecular structure... altering conceptual variables.
Using an obscene display of his divinity combined with absolute transmutation, Kaiju sank his invisible hands into the golden threads of Saki Yoshida's fate before the first tragedy took place.
He severed ties with the parasites who would manipulate her. He rewrote her parents' minds so they would give her the support and love she would lack. He altered the course of her school decisions, instilling in her a subtle yet unwavering willpower that would instantly reject any bad influence. In a matter of microseconds, the protagonist's fate changed drastically: braids gave way to loose, healthy hair, glasses reflected perfect grades, and the public restroom of her death was replaced by the glittering platform of her university graduation, surrounded by real friends and a genuine smile.
Saki Yoshida would have a happy, peaceful, and boringly beautiful life. The script of tragedy had been erased from existence.
"The victim has been saved..." Kaiju withdrew his hands, the white glow gradually fading as he tucked strands of jet-black hair behind his forehead. "Now... I must deal with the scum who designed the poison."
...
An hour later, in the dimly lit basement of a suburban nightclub, a group of five men laughed grotesquely. They were common criminals, abusers, and drug dealers of the worst kind, celebrating the profits of their worldly dealings while consuming illegal substances on a grimy pool table.
Suddenly, the basement lights flickered and went out completely.
The music from the club upstairs stopped. The air in the basement became so frigid that the men's breath began to escape in thick clouds of vapor.
"What the hell is wrong with the power?" grumbled the group's leader, a burly guy with vulgar tattoos on his arms, searching for his lighter. "Hey, go check the fuse!"
Before anyone could move, a faint silver glow began to emanate from the center of the room.
Sitting quietly on one of the wooden crates in the corner was a fifteen-year-old boy in a dark uniform. His legs were crossed, and he held a graphite pencil between his fingers, twirling it with perfect dexterity. His right eye was hidden behind dark glasses, but his left eye watched them with such absolute and cold indifference that it chilled them to the bone.
"Who are you, you damn brat? How did you get in here?!" one of them shouted, pulling an automatic knife from his pocket.
Kaiju stopped the pencil from spinning.
"Your existence is biological waste," Kaiju said, his voice projecting directly into the brains of the five criminals, causing them to bleed slightly from their ears due to the sheer density of the mental wave. "You have destroyed lives for fun. You have shattered the dignity of other human beings to fill your pathetic pockets. In the story I created, the gods did exactly the same thing... and that is why I extinguished them."
The men tried to lunge at him with lethal intent, driven by adrenaline-fueled panic, but space itself froze around their bodies. They couldn't move a single muscle; they remained suspended in the air like statues of trembling flesh.
Kaiju slowly stood up, removing his dark glasses. A dark, reddish aura began to emerge from his palm.
—I have created a new technique for parasites like you— Kaiju announced in an icy, unperturbed tone. —A place where death is not an escape, but an absolute process.
Crossing his fingers, he snapped his fingers.
"Eternal Hell," he declared.
The basement floor suddenly cracked open, but revealed no pipes or concrete. It opened wide into a pocket dimension created specifically by Kaiju's deranged genius.
The five criminals fell into the void screaming in utter despair.
They appeared floating in the middle of an immense and vast ocean of eternal misery. The sky of that dimension was made of boiling ash, and beneath them, thousands of grotesque creatures, amorphous humanoids born from the nightmares of Kaiju, stretched out their claws to tear at their flesh.
But the true terror of the technique lay in the conceptual design that Kaiju had structured using the gifts of the gods that he assimilated in his past:
He used the divinity of Hades and deities of the underworld to permanently anchor their souls to their spiritual bodies; no matter how many times grotesque creatures tore off their limbs, melted their eyelids with sulfur, or crushed their bones, their bodies would instantly regenerate. They would never die. They would never find relief from the void.
He used the mystical concept of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, to weave a passive web over their brains that became their worst curse: it ensured their minds processed and remembered every second of pain with the same lucidity, sharpness, and terror as the first millisecond. Their minds would never shut down, never break from the trauma, and never find escape from madness or psychological collapse. They would remember every sin, every scream of their theoretical victim, while their pride and their flesh were ground down for eternity in an endless cycle of forced repentance.
Floating above the vast ocean of misery and screams of Eternal Hell, Kaiju observed his creation with a cold and imperturbable satisfaction.
"This is your new home," Kaiju whispered, turning his back on them as a portal back to Kuoh opened before him. "Welcome to true hell."
He adjusted the dark glasses he had transmuted to conceal the thick scar over his right eye and voluntarily seal away the immensity of his divine powers.
...
The morning sun was beginning to paint the building's rooftop orange, but Kaiju didn't even blink at the light. His hand, lightly stained with the dust from the ashes he left behind after judging that scum, rested relaxed in his trouser pocket.
Kaiju approached the edge of the building, letting the wind tousle his black hair. His eyes, now devoid of any mystical gleam, seemed to focus on an invisible point in space, as if he were looking directly through the pages, directly into the eyes of those who were reading this story.
"You know," Kaiju said, with a crooked, almost mocking smile. "If this were real, if I weren't trapped in this fanfiction narrative, I swear on what little sanity I have left that I wouldn't have settled for a simple 'happy ending' for this disgusting world. I would have ripped that story out by the roots, erased that place's name from the map, and rewritten it from scratch with fire. There are some things that don't even deserve to be read, much less exist."
He paused, and for a second, the air around him vibrated with a divine intensity, as if the very fabric of reality were complaining of his presence.
"Well, the script's the script, isn't it?" He shrugged, dismissing the matter as he regained his stoic expression. "At least I made sure she had a chance. Now, listen carefully: enjoy this 'ending' and the peace I've just established. Take a breath, rest your eyes, and prepare yourselves."
Kaiju turned around, turning his back on the emptiness of the world he had just redeemed, and began walking towards the portal that would take him back to Kuoh.
—Because in the city where I'm going to study, things aren't going to be so... "clean." The real storm starts now. And I assure you, you won't want to miss a single second of what's coming. Supposedly, I have no memories of High School DxD... But, I'll have a harem, and to the delight of many, Grayfia will be there too.
Kaiju smiled and created another portal. He disappeared, going to another dimension.
Space tore open once more at the silent command of his will. Without a word, Kaiju stepped forward and plunged into a new dimensional rift, leaving behind the polluted air of the metropolis he had just purged.
Upon crossing the portal's threshold, his body experienced no friction like in previous leaps. This time, his soul's Energy Synchronization instantly adjusted to the laws of a flat universe, devoid of magic or Ki, yet strangely dense with twisted human intentions.
Using teleportation and guided by the spiritual vibration of his target, Kaiju appeared with a sharp POP! inside a damp, dimly lit basement. The smell of mold, iron, and sterile fluids permeated the air.
Before him, a gaunt-looking man with sadistic eyes raised a thick leather whip, bringing it down with brute force on the body of a small figure cowering on the ground. It was a slender girl, her pale skin covered in dirty bandages and gruesome burns, trembling silently, awaiting the impact. Sylvie.
Before the leather touched the girl's wounded skin, time itself seemed to stop in the room.
Kaiju stepped in front of the blow, extending his left arm. The tip of the whip struck his forearm with a dry crack, but didn't cause the slightest scratch; the man's physical strength was completely nullified by the supernatural toughness of the fifteen-year-old.
The attacker blinked, completely stunned, trying to pull the whip away, but Kaiju's grip was immovable. When he looked up, the man met the icy gaze of a teenager whose pale vertical scar above his right eye gleamed in the gloom.
"Your script ends here," Kaiju declared, his voice projecting directly like a mental thunderclap into the abuser's brain.
Without giving him time to scream or understand the nature of the being before him, Kaiju manifested another dark, reddish energy in his palm. Crossing his fingers, he snapped his fingers.
"Eternal Hell," he declared coldly.
The basement floor opened up into a chasm of absolute darkness. The man fell backward into the void, his screams instantly extinguished as he was swallowed by the ocean of ash and the grotesque creatures Kaiju had previously designed with the divine powers of Hades and Mnemosyne. His eternal punishment began in that very second, trapped in a cycle where death and madness would forever be forbidden to him.
The basement fell silent once more, broken only by the girl's ragged breathing. Kaiju turned slowly, the gleam in his eyes fading to reveal their usual brown hue, and knelt before Sylvie, extending a gentle hand to wipe the dust from her face. His intervention in the worlds of tragedy was over.
...
The cold of the stone floor was the only familiar thing.
Sylvie squeezed her eyes shut, curling her frail body, covered in filthy bandages and festering burns. Her muscles tensed instinctively, awaiting the unmistakable, dull swish of the whip cutting through the damp basement air. Pain was her only certainty; agony, her daily routine. She had learned that crying or pleading only made things worse, so she braced herself for the punishment in absolute silence.
But the blow never came.
Instead, a sharp crack echoed just inches from her face. Sylvie slowly opened her good eye, trembling like a leaf about to fall in winter. Before her, an unfamiliar figure stood like an unyielding wall. A young boy, dressed in dark clothing, had stopped the thick leather of the whip with his bare arm, without so much as flinching.
Then, the world in front of her simply shattered.
Sylvie didn't understand the exact words the boy spoke, but she felt the pure, cold, primal terror that emanated from the ground. A chasm of absolute darkness opened beneath her master's feet. The man who had stripped her of her humanity, who had treated her worse than garbage, vanished into an abyss of stifled screams and grotesque shadows.
And as quickly as that hellhole opened, it closed. The basement was plunged into a deathly silence.
The little slave girl gasped, her heart pounding so hard she felt it would burst her ribs. She was paralyzed with panic. If this mysterious boy had made her cruel master vanish with a single command, to a place so dreadful that the mere scent of ash still lingered in the air... what horrors awaited her?
She closed her eyes again, shrinking even further, bracing herself for a fate worse than death.
Soft footsteps approached. Sylvie shuddered violently when a hand touched her face.
But there were no blows. No hair-pulling. No pain.
She opened her eyes slowly, blinking in disbelief. The boy was kneeling in front of her, at her eye level. His gaze was no longer the terrifying, merciless vortex that had swallowed her attacker; now, his good eye was a warm, peaceful brown, crossed by a pale vertical scar that gave it an air of deep melancholy.
With a gentleness that Sylvie had never experienced in her entire tragic life, he gently ran his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the dust and ingrained dirt.
The boy gave her a small, serene smile, devoid of any ill intent. Then, he stepped back an inch and extended his open hand toward her.
"You don't have to suffer anymore," he said, his calm voice seeming to dispel all the cold that had accumulated in that basement. "If you wish to come with me... I will take you out of this place."
Sylvie gazed at the outstretched hand. It was clean, firm, and promised something she thought was extinct in the world: safety. Her eyes filled with warm tears that streamed down her bruised cheeks. With a herculean effort, she lifted her bandaged, trembling, and weak arm and placed her slender fingers on the young man's warm palm.
He gently wrapped her small hand around it, sending her comforting warmth. For the first time in her life, Sylvie felt she could breathe.