Lucian sat slouched on a bench, looking so lifeless that any passerby would have assumed he had completely lost the will to live. He stared blankly at the dirt road ahead of him, his shoulders hunched.
"Ahhhh, how did I mess up so badly?!" he suddenly yelled out, burying his face in his hands and aggressively grabbing his hair.
A couple of local citizens carrying baskets of vegetables flinched, casting worried glances at the strange boy before quickening their pace. Lucian ignored them entirely. He was too busy drowning in his own self-directed frustration.
When he had made the deal to cross over into this world, he had been so focused on his target, the specific artifact he needed to hide his identity, that he hadn't thought about when or where to drop in.
It was only after his feet touched the solid ground of this city that the agonizing reality of his careless mistake finally clicked in his brain.
His meta-power was making him soft. He was falling into the trap of easy power. Before he had this power, back when he was a weak, struggling devil in the Underworld(pretend that wasn't just a few months ago), he had to think every single move through.
He calculated risks, planned contingencies, and used his head, always trying to make sure that he didn't end up dead somewhere because he made a careless mistake. Back then, a single misstep meant being eaten by a rogue demonic monsters or made a mistake and got executed by a noble by getting caught by them.
He had scraped by on scraps, surviving on cunning and his paranoia. But lately? He had gotten so used to the safety of the Summoning and the absolute protection of active deals that he had forgotten a fundamental truth: some things could be obtained the old-fashioned way.
By simply taking them.
He recalled a scene from the anime where the corrupt Prime Minister Honest had shown Esdeath the imperial vault, displaying the massive, glittering stockpile of remaining Teigu.
If Lucian had only thought to drop into the timeline a few months earlier, or positioned himself near the capital's foundations before the security tightened as a result of all the assassinations, he could have broken in and robbed the Empire blind.
He wouldn't have had to negotiate with anyone. He could have simply bypassed the palace guards and stashed dozens of ancient superweapons into his Gate.
He couldn't help the vicious, hungry grin that spread across his face at the thought. 'By Lucifer, can you imagine the power?'
If he had played his cards right, he might have even found a way to take Esdeath's power. Absolute ice manipulation and the ability to freeze even the very fabric of space and time.
Oh, that would have been so awesome, ice control like that. Technically, he could still get it, but his grin quickly faded into a grimace. No, Esdeath was not a person you could easily sit across a table from.
If he had to rank her compared to the other figures he had negotiated with, her pride and bloodlust would place her just slightly below the Golden King, Gilgamesh.
The only reason his deal with Gilgamesh had worked was that he had caught the King at his absolute lowest, most desperate moment, when the loss of his only friend had affected him greatly, and he had all but searched and failed to find immortality.
Still, Gilgamesh, for all his arrogance, had been very desperate, that's why Lucian had managed to make him agree, but Esdeath.
Esdeath, on the other hand, was a lunatic through and through. She would never willingly trade like that with someone she perceived as weaker than her, and if she suspected he was stronger, she would treat him as the ultimate prey to be hunted to the death.
And while Lucian was currently more powerful than almost anyone else in this world, beating her in a direct fight was a massive gamble that he only saw himself losing at. Her power over ice was absolute, she once froze an entire continent, and that's not even talking about that terrifying trump card of hers, Maha-Padma, which could freeze the literal flow of time, that would easily spell his end if he grew arrogant, thinking he could take her on.
So, going anywhere near that sadistic, blood-soaked general without a foolproof plan was a death wish that he would like to avoid.
Still, he had come to this world for one specific prize. Any other Teigu he managed to pick up along the way would just be a bonus.
His main target was Phantasmagoria, commonly known as the Gaea Foundation.
It was a cosmetic Teigu that allowed its user to seamlessly transform into any living creature, matching their form, voice, and physical attributes perfectly. Because its transformation was based on physical, biological restructuring rather than active magic, it would emit absolutely no mana signature.
In the DxD world, where nearly everything is magic, he would have an untraceable, non-magical shapeshifting tool, which was priceless. It was the perfect disguise tool.
He would be able to go anywhere, hide anywhere, and no magic would be able to track him.
To be honest, it wasn't his absolute first choice. He had initially tried to target the Ben 10 universe to acquire an ID mask. But the cost for accessing that world had made his jaw drop.
Seven thousand years of lifespan.
It was higher than the Fate universe, for Satan's sake. But when he sat down and actually thought about it, the price made sense. People often remembered Ben 10 as a fun, nostalgic cartoon about a kid with an alien watch, completely forgetting the sheer scale of that universe.
The aliens in the Omnitrix weren't just simple aliens, they were entire species out there, meaning it wasn't only the ones in Ben's watch. Species like Chronosapiens, who could manipulate the flow of time, Atomix's race, who wielded raw nuclear fusion, and at the very peak, the Celestialsapiens, the species of Alien X.
A race of actual, literal gods who resided in the Forge of Creation and could rewrite the laws of reality with a single, agreed-upon thought.
So yeah, seven thousand years was actually a massive bargain to gain access to that kind of cosmic playground. But while it was cheap in the grand scheme of things, it was a price his current life ledger couldn't afford to pay, well, not couldn't but wouldn't.
So, the Gaea Foundation was his best, most cost-effective alternative.
Now, he just had to find its current user, Chelsea.
If his memory served him right, she was a member of Night Raid, and she met her tragic, brutal end during a chaotic confrontation in a deep canyon. Lucian didn't remember all the exact details of the battle, the Akame ga Kill anime had annoyed him so much with its rapid-fire character deaths and bleak ending that he had tuned out most of the specifics, but he knew she was doomed.
Something about, was it getting cocky and then losing her head, right?
He stood up from the bench, brushing the dust off his dark trousers. He closed his eyes and let his observation Haki stretch outward.
He trusted his power, at least that it would not just leave him out to dry. He had asked for something and was dropped here, so that meant that what he was looking for was close. It was odd, though, the last times he asked for something, his power brought him to it immediately, but not this time.
He wanted to secure the Gaea Foundation, but he also had a golden opportunity to grab two of the most lethal blades in this world, the Murasame, the One-Cut Killer, and Yatsufusa, the March of the Dead.
The curse of Murasame's instant poison was something anyone would fear, and Yatsufusa's ability to bind and puppet the souls of the dead that he killed could allow him to build an impressive guard squad for himself, the ultimate Jumping weapon. Someone attacking you, thinking you're alone, then Baam, it goes from a 1v1 to a 1v8.
He let out a mad giggle. Oh, now He had no intention of leaving this world without those two swords in his vault. He needed them.
"Now, where are you hiding?" he muttered, looking toward the eastern horizon.
As if the world itself was answering his question, a massive, thunderous explosion roared from the far east, shaking the distant ground.
Lucian's lips curved into a sharp, demonic smirk. "Bingo."
With a sudden burst of speed, he vanished from the street as he ran towards the area. Opening his wings and taking off quickly.
In the Canyon.
Leone winced, her teeth gritted so hard they threatened to crack as she clutched her heavily bleeding arm. Her golden, beast-like ears twitched, keeping an ear out for the footsteps of the enemies just in case, through the thick smoke from Bols's explosion. The left sleeve of her shirt was shredded, the golden fur of her Lionel transformation matted with dark blood where one of kurome's puppet's blades had sheared through her muscle down to the bone and cut her arm off.
'We underestimated them', she thought bitterly, spitting a mouthful of hot blood onto the cracked stone beneath her. 'We underestimated the Jaegers'.
They should have known better. Esdeath didn't select weaklings for her personal execution unit. Night Raid had planned a careful ambush, expecting to catch Wave, Kurome, and Bols off guard in the narrow pass. But they hadn't accounted for the grotesque horror of Kurome's Teigu, Yatsufusa.
The devil girl had summoned eight powerful, reanimated corpses to fight in her stead, including giant danger beasts and powerful assassins, completely flipping the ambush on Night Raid's numerical advantage and turning the narrow canyon into their own hell.
Still, even with the odds stacked against them, Night Raid had fought like cornered wolves, slowly pushing the Jaegers back. That was when the real disaster struck.
Bols, realizing he was cornered and his flamethrower was failing, had made a suicidal decision. He had detonated the pressurized tank of his flame-thrower Teigu, Rubicante.
The resulting explosion was cataclysmic. A wall of absolute, white-hot fire rushed through the canyon, tearing through the stone walls and melting the very ground beneath their feet. Leone had barely managed to throw her body over Akame, shielding her teammate from the worst of the concussive blast. The heat had scorched her flesh, and her vision was rapidly spinning into darkness as her beast-like regeneration struggled to keep up with the overwhelming pain.
As she lay there on the trembling, ash-covered ground, her consciousness beginning to flicker, she forced her heavy eyelids open one last time.
And she saw it.
High above the billowing black smoke. Was...was she imagining things, or was that a silhouette hovering in the sky looking at them?.
It had leathery bat-like wings spread wide, completely undisturbed by the rising heat, and was it a person? She must be really out of it.
"What... is that...?" Leone wheezed, her voice failing her as the golden fur of her transformation receded, her body slipping into absolute unconsciousness.
Far above the ruined canyon, Lucian looked down at the fallen warriors, his silver and crimson eyes gleaming through the haze.
HE grinned. He had found them.
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