I want to thank Reiks 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.
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Behind the old gymnasium, the self-proclaimed Perverted Quartet had taken refuge after running for their lives.
Issei lay sprawled on the grass, face-up, his lungs wheezing like an old kettle. Beside him, Matsuda and Motohama leaned against the brick wall, sweating buckets, their faces red and their legs trembling like jelly. They had sprinted three entire blocks escaping the murderous fury of the Kendo Club's bamboo swords.
Kaiju, meanwhile, stood beside them casually leaning against the wall with his hands inside his school pants pockets. His breathing was perfectly steady. There was not a single drop of sweat on his forehead. Compared to fleeing from a hungry green dinosaur on a beach or enduring ten times Earth's gravity on a god's planet, jogging across a high school courtyard did not even qualify as joint warm-up exercise.
"K-Kaiju…" Issei wheezed, raising a trembling hand toward him. "How... how the hell are you not... sweating? We ran for our lives!"
"Good running posture and breath control, Issei. The secret lies in the diaphragm," Kaiju lied with complete ease while pulling a small transmuted juice box from his pocket and taking a sip.
Before Issei could complain about the genetic injustice of his new friend, the atmosphere in the outer hallway changed.
It was not a shift in temperature, nor a gust of wind. It was something far more terrifying for the male psyche of Kuoh Academy. It was the sound of high-pitched giggles, excited whispers, and the sensation that the very air had filled itself with invisible sparkles and imaginary roses.
"Oh no…" muttered Motohama while adjusting his glasses as an aura of pure darkness and envy surrounded him. "He's here."
Turning the corner, walking with the grace of a European nobleman and a smile that seemed to radiate light itself, appeared Kiba Yuuto. The "Prince" of Kuoh Academy. His blond hair fell perfectly over his blue eyes, and his uniform did not have a single wrinkle. A group of three girls followed close behind him, sighing every time he breathed.
"Hello, Issei-kun. Hello, guys," Kiba greeted in a gentle, friendly voice, stopping for a moment when he saw them collapsed on the ground. "Are you alright? You look exhausted."
Issei clenched his teeth so hard he nearly cracked a molar. Matsuda growled under his breath. The trio's hatred toward Kiba was palpable, a force of nature born from the purest, most absolute, and most pathetic form of teenage envy.
Kaiju observed the blond from where he stood. At first glance, Kiba was merely an extremely handsome boy. But to Kaiju's senses, trained by gods and forged through Yardrat's spiritual control, Kiba Yuuto was a walking beacon of abnormal energy.
An energy that was dense, dark, and undeniably demonic.
On his very first day of school, when Kaiju sensed that demonic Ki signature emanating from the old school building, he had almost entered combat mode. He had thought this world was a normal human one, but after scanning the academy with his senses, he discovered it was infested with supernatural entities. Kiba was only one of them. There was a red-haired girl with immense power, a black-haired girl with water-like energy, and several more signatures.
Kaiju's protective instinct, paranoid after losing Tohka, drove him to secretly investigate them over the course of three nights. Hiding his own divine energy until he became less noticeable than a ghost, he observed them from the skies and the shadows.
The result?
The terrifying devils of Kuoh spent their afternoons doing paperwork, drinking elegant tea, and fulfilling mundane contracts like helping elderly women or searching for lost objects. The only time he saw them fight was against another malicious being that had gone insane — a "Stray Devil." They did not hunt innocent humans. They did not terrorize the city. They simply managed their territory.
"If they don't hurt humans, and they don't mess with me or the tree in the park, I won't do anything," Kaiju had decided, establishing his golden rule. "Live and let live. I'm not an exorcist. I'm a student."
Knowing this, Kaiju felt neither fear nor supernatural hostility toward the blond knight standing before him. He could erase Kiba from existence with a restrained Kamehameha or crush him with purple gravity in the blink of an eye.
But as he watched the girls behind Kiba sighing and offering damp towels to the "poor prince," a much darker and more primitive feeling blossomed in the reincarnated god's chest.
His otaku side. His ego as a teenager without a girlfriend.
Kiba gave Kaiju a gentlemanly smile.
"You must be the transfer student. It's a pleasure to meet you, I'm Kiba Yuuto. I hope we get along well."
Kaiju stared back at him with the single eye he kept uncovered. All of Yardrat's spiritual wisdom, his Turtle School martial stoicism, and his status as a Creator immediately went straight into the trash.
"You damn sparkling pretty boy…" Kaiju muttered under his breath with the same venom as his friends.
"Unforgivable!" hissed Issei from the ground while punching the grass. "Look at him, sparkling for no reason! I bet he sweats expensive cologne!"
"He must be destroyed! For the sake of average masculinity!" Matsuda added while comically sobbing.
"I support the motion, gentlemen," Kaiju said with a frown, crossing his arms and officially integrating himself into the Perverted Quartet's hive mind. "If he smiles again with that shojo anime sparkle effect, I swear I'm putting dirt in his shoes."
Kiba blinked, suddenly feeling an irrational chill crawl down his spine, completely unaware that one of the four idiots glaring at him with murderous jealousy possessed enough power to split the planet in half. He smiled nervously, waved goodbye, and continued toward the old school building.
Kaiju sighed and pulled out another juice box. The devils of Kuoh could relax. He would not start a holy war against them. But if Kiba kept stealing all the girls' attention in class, then he was definitely going to declare scholastic warfare against him.
...
Night had fallen over Kuoh City, wrapping it beneath a blanket of neon lights and deep shadows.
Two thousand meters above the ground, far beyond the clouds and urban noise, a solitary figure floated in defiance of gravity. Kaiju sat cross-legged in empty air, sustained only by Buku Jutsu. The freezing high-altitude winds whipped his black jacket around him, but his body, forged within the worst gravitational hells imaginable, did not even feel the cold.
With his lone uncovered eye, he gazed down upon the city beneath his feet.
During the day, he was the bored student hanging around with the three biggest idiots in the academy. But at night, the lethargy vanished.
A few weeks earlier, using his Ki perception and Spirit Control, Kaiju had categorized the supernatural entities within his city. The group led by the "pretty boy" Kiba and the red-haired girl presiding over the Occult Research Club resembled a civilized mafia. They had territory, rules, and from what he had observed, they fulfilled harmless wishes in exchange for some kind of spiritual payment. As long as they kept their hands off innocent humans, Kaiju was willing to ignore them.
However, Kaiju's spiritual radar had also detected another category of energy signatures.
They were disgusting. Chaotic, dark, rotten. Presences devoid of rules or reason — bloodthirsty beasts lurking in dark alleys and abandoned factories in search of human flesh. Monsters that had lost their sanity. "Strays," he called them in his mind.
And if there was one thing the Creator of Heavenly Eyes would not tolerate, it was rabid dogs hunting inside his backyard.
Kaiju's instincts detected a spike of static energy. Abandoned factory, southern district. One of those rotten signatures had just appeared, and nearby was the faint, terrified Ki of a human — probably a homeless man or someone who had taken the wrong route home.
Kaiju stood up in the air. He sighed, letting boredom give way to absolute coldness.
"Nobody touches a human in my city," he murmured.
He placed two fingers against his forehead.
POP!
He vanished from the night sky and instantly materialized inside the dark, damp interior of the abandoned factory. The stench of rotten blood and rust nearly made him wrinkle his nose.
In front of him, cornering a terrified office worker against a brick wall, stood a monstrosity straight out of a nightmare. It resembled a grotesque fusion between a praying mantis and the torso of a pale woman, with enormous bone blades instead of arms and a maw overflowing with drooling fangs.
The Stray Devil slowly turned around after sensing the faint displacement of air and stared at the eyepatch-wearing teenager.
"Aaaaanother preeeeey…?" hissed the monster in a distorted voice while clacking its blades together. "You smell... very good. You smell like power…"
"And you smell like unrecycled garbage," Kaiju replied while slipping both hands into his jacket pockets. "Hey, buddy," he said to the office worker without looking at him, "close your eyes and cover your ears. This is about to get ugly."
The demon released a shrill screech and lunged at Kaiju, ready to split him in half.
But the boy did not use Ki. He did not use Transmutation. He simply pulled one hand from his pocket and tossed six small metal spheres into the air.
"Dinner time, boys. General cleanup."
The six Poké Balls opened simultaneously, releasing an explosion of white light so blinding it illuminated the enormous factory as though it were daytime.
Alpha Squad landed with impacts powerful enough to shake the building's foundations. The hellish training within the pocket dimension had borne fruit. They were no longer adorable first-stage creatures; they had become titans of destruction, hardened beneath multiplied gravity and Ki attacks.
Tank, the towering Aggron, stepped between the demon and the office worker. With a casual swing of his steel arm, he deflected the monster's bone blade as though it were cardboard, shattering it into pieces.
The Stray Devil howled in pain and staggered backward, only to collide directly into a wall of blue scales. Tiburoncin, a battle-scarred two-meter-tall Garchomp, stared down at it with a sadistic grin before unleashing a Dragon Claw at supersonic speed, amputating two mantis legs within a microsecond.
"W-What are these things?!" screamed the demon while vomiting black blood and attempting to climb the wall in escape.
Before it could ascend, the earth around it exploded. Tery, the gigantic Tyranitar, slammed his heavy tail into the ground, summoning a Stone Edge that impaled the monster and dragged it back toward the center of the factory.
As the Stray Devil shrieked across the floor, Pinzas, the enormous Kingler, approached sideways while clacking his colossal main claw — now nearly as large as Kaiju himself. With a deafening metallic snap, he used Guillotine and cleanly separated the humanoid torso from the creature's arachnid lower body.
The demon's upper half crawled desperately across the floor, attempting to curse its executioners.
A shadow fell over the creature.
Char, a massive and muscular Charizard, landed before it while exhaling smoke. His reptilian eyes displayed absolutely no mercy. He opened his jaws and, without even waiting for an order, unleashed a point-blank Flamethrower with the heat of a crematory furnace, reducing the Stray Devil's torso to ashes in less than three seconds.
The entire battle had lasted under a minute.
Kaiju slowly walked toward the creature's smoldering remains. Floating gracefully beside him in her beautiful pale blue and white astral dress was Lala. The Shiny Gardevoir had used her psychic powers to create a soundproof barrier around the factory. Nobody outside had heard the explosions or the roars.
"Good work, Lala," Kaiju murmured, and the Gardevoir nodded while transmitting a pulse of pride into his mind.
The office worker, who had remained curled up with his eyes tightly shut, barely opened one eyelid, horrified by the massacre.
Lala turned toward him. Her reddish eyes glowed softly, and with an elegant motion of her fingers, she completely erased the last fifteen minutes from the man's memory. The office worker immediately fell into a deep sleep, believing he had simply fainted from exhaustion.
Kaiju smiled faintly while looking at his six monsters. Tiburoncin sharpened his claws against a steel beam, Char released tiny streams of fire into the air, and Tery casually ate a chunk of concrete from the wall. They were brutal, savage, and absolutely loyal.
"Retreat, team. The area is clean," Kaiju ordered.
With six beams of red light, Alpha Squad returned to their spheres.
Kaiju slipped the Poké Balls back into his pockets. He glanced one final time at the black stain on the ground where the demon had once stood. What he did not realize was that with every "night cleanup," he was stealing hunting contracts away from Rias Gremory and Sona Sitri, leaving the city's administrators utterly bewildered by the sudden and systematic disappearance of Stray Devils throughout their territory.
Placing two fingers against his forehead once more, Kaiju vanished with a silent POP.
The city was safe for another night.
And tomorrow, he still had to survive another math class with Issei and Matsuda. Sometimes, being a hero was the easiest part of his day.