Mushroom clouds rose high in the distance. Red felt the heat on his face. No one believed the government would drop a nuke on American soil. Blue, his opponent, was so shocked that he stood there, watching the explosion with him. Birds fell out of the sky, breaking through windows of cars and buildings. In the distance, a dust storm of superheated sand blasted in their direction.
"Do you think that did it?" Blue asked as they broke apart.
The things he saw, the people he saved, and the people that couldn't be saved flashed through his mind. He remembered the tunnels that dug deep into the earth and the breeding chambers they failed to reach.
"No," Red left his thoughts unsaid. The returner was sure the goblins had spread past containment.
The portal to the other world, located in Oklahoma, had spewed forth an army of goblins. Unlike the easily killed mobs from fantasy, these creatures were a bio weapon. They multiplied rapidly by using humans as hosts and adapted to local technology at an alarming rate.
Neither Red nor Blue would be in the state if not for the crisis, and more importantly, the pay system points for every goblin slain. The event even offered bonuses in the form of pills that would typically cost thousands of points.
Returners died so that a few people would live, and the nuke made their sacrifice worthless. The goblins would breed safely underground and then return to terrorize their people.
The points weren't the reason why they clashed.
"You know I had nothing to do with my cousin's crimes." Red tried a final time to wiggle out of the fight. His stamina was low, and he told the truth.
"It doesn't matter anymore. I don't like you. What other reason do we need to fight? If not your cousin's crimes, I would have found another reason."
Red thought it had more to do with his cousin the serial rapist. That's why Fred Hollow became Red, but Blue knew him before. Red was guilty of being related to a space mage with a horrible hobby.
He held up his thumb, and the closest cloud wasn't covered. Red let his hand drop. Radiation would hit them soon if it hadn't already. He had taken two green pills of the troll variant in his life and a red pill of adaptation recently. In his storage ring, he had a third green pill, but that was the last one of that type he could take. The next pill up was 10,000 points a pill, and they had a limit of 3 as well.
A flaming bird corpse flew through a car window, and as if on signal, their fight continued.
They activated their movement skills and clashed. Sparks jumped from their blades as they moved at superhuman speeds. They moved, leaping onto cars and then the walls of buildings, their swings creating afterimages in the air as they slashed, blocked, and feinted to drive each other into the one fatal opening that would end the fight. Glass cracked, and the walls of buildings exploded as space warped. He glided between buildings, shrinking the distance between them to a step, all the while crossing blades with Blue.
His high-speed technique drove him harder, eating into his stamina to keep up, but their techniques were too different. Instead of investing in a firm foundation of skills, Blue upgraded his movement technique to F-rank and added a supplementary skill to its tree. Red's skill was a space warping, resource-hungry monster that not even his massive stamina could fill for long.
Red's skill ran out of stamina first, forcing him to take a slash across the arm. Another blow rattled his wrist as Blue rained blows down on his blade, and Red barely blocked his opponent. With every strike, his blade chipped away metal pieces, rolling and flying away.
All he could do was tighten his footwork and hope his robust agility attribute would see him through.
He was forced to rely on his stamina rather than their preferred resource for his skills. With half of his payment from the goblin event, Red had the system craft a skill for him. Unfortunately, he had to survive the fight first to see it.
Blue's movement skill ran out, and Red took a risk and activated his piercing skill, diabolical thrust. The sudden loss of speed created an opening, and his blade sank into Blue's side.
He pulled his weapon free, and in a flash, a pink-haired girl punched him. "Hell yeah,"
Several of his ribs caved in, and he was sent spinning across the ground. His sword was shattered. A green glow lit his vision. A pink haired girl with a fat ass was healing Blue.
It took a precious second for his mind to catch up to what was happening. His mind translated the word. The girl said, "Shannaro." he was sure of it.
Wait he knew those hips and fat ass anywhere. That was Sakura Haruno from Naruto. What was going on?
"This is my victory," Blue said.
Sakura drew a kunai. "I'll finish him."
"No, let him suffer," Blue said.
"He's stuck here. Maybe he'll get away and I can crush him again." Blue looked back at the approaching dust cloud. "I doubt it."
Blue tapped his phone and opened a portal before stepping through with Sakura Hurano, which wasn't something Red would ever believe he would see.
He looked back at the caved-in building where their fight began, and he dropped his phone. Red tossed back his last green pill and crawled toward his phone. With it, he could access the Neuroverse app and open a portal of his own. If he didn't find his phone before the blast hit, he would lose all access to the system and would never advance beyond his current level of power.
He felt his rips crackle and pop as the pill put him back together. Red rose to his knees and began to crawl. Somehow, he got to his feet and made it to the scrap pile. He searched while the air grew hotter and the storm hit the edge of town. He kept digging until he felt it. Through the broken glass and concrete, he found the only thing not broken in the pile.
Red had purchased a bunch of quality-of-life upgrades to make his phone nearly indestructible, self-charging, and self-repairing. He recalled seeing a building with a basement during the fight.
With a final use of his movement skill, he managed to get underground before the storm hit.
Red felt toes pop back into place after being broken. He had been lucky.
He thought about opening a portal to a safe place, maybe in New Mexico, but Blue had Sakura Hurano. What was the deal with that?
He felt his phone buzz and looked at the text.
Monster King's Harem Cultivation: Cultivate and refine the powerful lewd mana of monster girls and ascend the ranks from a useless simp to a god. Each monster girl will grant the user unique abilities, and with each lewd act committed, you will be rewarded with Origin Chi. The user can utilize this chi to power any skill from the divine or demonic realms.
Rank: G 0%
Requirement: Monster Girls
Was the system pranking him?
Alright, he could do this; he was only somewhat irradiated. He wasn't melting yet, so maybe he was fine. Then again, he was a little tougher than a normal human. G5 vitality was no joke. G might sound like it's weak, but most humans only have G1 or G2 in an attribute and never more than G1 Vitality.
He opened the app and checked the world Gatcha a little more thoroughly. After flipping through it, there was a fiction section he missed. That section had several choices, but he found one with the appearance of a monster girl on it. If this wasn't fate, then nothing was.
Red purchased a pack of girl cards. A set of cards used to capture waifus.
At Rank G, he could only have up to 40. If that didn't say something about how they were valued, nothing would. This was more about power than anything else for Red but he wanted to fuck a monster girl. What guy didn't?
Then he saw the price. Ten thousand points a roll, and to get the best chance, he needed 10 rolls. Red had around 150,000 points left, but this was going to wipe him out.
What he needed was an easy world to cut his teeth on, maybe a slice of life.
He activated the Gatcha and held his breath.
Tokyo Ghoul Rank: F
Rosario Vampire Rank: D
Beaststars Rank: G
Ms. Kobiashi's Dragon Maid Rank: B
Monster Girl Quest Rank: SSS
So I'm A Spider Now Rank: B
Interspecies Reviewers Rank: C
Elfen Lied Rank: E
Highschool DXD Rank: A
Hasbin Hotel. Rank: B
In the late and great tradition of giving titles of worlds without context, Red was grateful that, for once, he didn't need any. As for the ranks, it was terrifying. But he got it, oh, he got it very well. Each world had its big bad, except for Beast Stars and A Centaur's Life.
Those would be his first targets if he were playing it safe. He had two goals: his first one was to gather as much Origin energy as possible, and his far less critical goal was to assemble a team to help him end the goblin invasion.
He wasn't sure how he stole Sakura from the Naruto world. The guy probably posed as a civilian until the right moment and carded her before leaving.
As for the extremely high-ranking monstrous worlds, such as Monster Girl Quest, it had to be the blatant time travel and merging of angels and monsters into chaotic forms. If that wasn't the issue, he didn't know what was.
Beaststars would be incredibly safe for his first time, only there was nothing of value there. Anthropomorphic creatures had to be considered monster girls, but maybe they didn't. It was better to go to Tokyo Ghoul or Hasbin Hotel, he knew those worlds better. They weren't safe, but high-risk, high-reward.
Red was just a little G-rank nobody trying to tackle a problem bigger than himself. Blue had shown him that going at it alone would only get him killed.
Possibly radioactive sand slowly fell into the basement. He wanted to escape his problems, if only for a few months.
Maybe he should check it out. He checked his options for the drop, mindful of the other worlds he had access to; only three could be banked, so he chose Monster Girl Quest, Rosario Vampire, and Tokyo Ghoul. Once he finished with the F rank worlds, he would be ready for harder ones, hopefully.
Hasbin Hotel had blessed weapons he could nab and a few named girls. Demons and angels counted as monster girls.
With his decision made. How was he dropping in? He could drop in at random, or he could appear at the start of the series. Charlie was a bleeding heart; maybe he could room at her hotel and go from there.
He thought his best chance at getting a blessed weapon was to drop in on Extermination Day. Red knew a thing or two about the show, and if heaven freaked out from just one angel dying, then imagine how they would freak if tons of them died.
…
When the red swirly portal appeared with little golden trim around the edges where the hell gate touched reality, Red had a thought. Did demons and angels count as monster girls? Well, he wasn't sure about the animal people in Beast Stars, but in a lot of media, demons counted as monsters, and if they were also girls, they had to count.
Those thoughts ran in circles as he watched the portal swirl. He pulled his backup sword from his storage ring. It wasn't much more than a piece of spring steel in the approximation of a sword, nothing compared to what blacksmiths returners could hammer out.
Red didn't have the kind of money to get their attention, so to hell he would go to get all the nice weapons he could find.
He stepped through the portal and appeared in a back alley.
Red watched angels sweep through the sky, wielding golden weapons from the arsenal of heaven itself. Golden feathers rained as they grouped up on a sinner with the body of a giraffe.
Hazbin Hotel Drop-In Event: Extermination Day
Angels will temporarily be weakened to G-rank until the completion of this event.
Slay Angels
Rewards
Weapon Title: Angel Slayer, rank determined by the number of angels slain
50,000 Souls
1000pt
One banked low, and Red used his movement skill. Mile Skipping Step to cut distance by squeezing space, but it used up his stamina. Utilizing the skill made him feel like he had run a mile. He activated his other skill as he took a step approaching the flying form of an exorcist mid-thrust.
Diabolic Thrust turned his blade black with endless serrated edges. He slammed it home in the back of the angel, pinning the blade into the road. She wiggled like an insect pinned to the wall.
"Well, it's safe to say Diabolic Thrust works on angels. The protection your kind enjoys against the forces of this hell does not protect you from demonic power. If that's the case, then what power do the demons here use?" Red looked back to see that the angel had died.
They were D rank typically. This meant that their bodies were incredibly resilient, even without their natural hack abilities.
He pilfered her halberd and a short sword from her belt. Then he dumped the body in his storage ring.
The exorcists pulled their spears out of the sinner they cornered, only just noticing a missing member of their team. Red activated his movement skill and slashed out against the unarmored enemies with shocking ease. Each slash cut a throat or pierced between the ribs.
Angels didn't bother wearing blessed armor to protect themselves from blessed weapons. That seemed like a hilarious oversight. He collected the weapons and bodies of the angels and turned into an alley.
Sinners hid while he went on the hunt.
He chugged a stamina potion and felt his weariness recede.
"Where the fuck did you come from?" Adam shrieked like a fool who couldn't control their emotions.
Red rested the blade of his new sword over his shoulder and smiled pleasantly. He raised the blade and spun it a few times, admiring the weight.
"You know, I was just exploring," Red said, and it wasn't far from the truth.
"Lute we have a live one up here where the heck is Squad Zeta they should have checked in after killing that Giraffe bitch. Wait is than blessed weapon you're waving in front of my like some psycho serial killer fuck?" Adam asked.
"Nah man, I found it in a Giraffe. I didn't expect hell to look like Zootopia got busy with a hot topic, to be honest." Red sliced through the concrete with ease, but made a show of balancing on the blade. "Now that I have it in my hand, it's growing on me."
"Sir, protocol dictates we quarantine him from the denizens before escorting him back to the world of the living. He will be judged for his crimes like any other soul when his life comes to an end."
"I'll return when I'm ready. I'm still seeing the sights."
"Sir, Beta Team reported Alpha Team failed their mission. They are requesting immediate evac."
Wait, why were they vocalizing this information when they could communicate through light energy?
"Listen, you should come with us. I'm Adam, the first man; you could say I'm the father of mankind. So don't be a fucking disappointment like the wretches down here. Come with me, and you might get to see heaven before I send you back. Doesn't that sound awesome?" Adam glanced to the side, and Red stepped away from a spear aimed at his back. "Fuck can't any of you do something right tonight. Are we going to have to come back in six months for a do-over?"
"How did you find me out?"
"You're wearing a sheath that wouldn't happen if you found the blade sticking out of a sinner."
From the reflection in a window, Red saw an angel dive for him with an ax and drew a blessed spear from his storage ring in a reversed grip. The angel impaled herself through the chest as the butt of the spear slammed into the concrete and held firm in a crack on the poorly repaired road.
Angels were fast, strong, and experienced; there was no doubt, but they left themselves open to attack constantly. They had no fear and did not attempt to watch their backs or be vigilant for sneak attacks.
Red stored the angel before she hit the dirt, adding her full arsenal and her body to his ring.
"That was bullshit. You saw her reflection in a window." The angel raised his hand, and a beam of light blasted forward in a wide cone. The street was vaporized, buildings turned to ash, and sinners were erased. He activated his skill before the telegraphed laser could fire and stepped out of the way.
Did the angel not see him move? Sure, space warped, and he left an afterimage, but that shouldn't have been enough to throw them off. The system nerfed them for their drop-in.
He ducked into an alley and listened. More exorcists gathered as he put more distance between himself and them.
Space warped, and he moved miles in steps. Roads cracked as he moved, and the world thrummed as space itself compressed before relaxing.
Sweat poured down his face. Red nearly died from that joke. He made his way through the city, avoiding angels. It was too early to take another stamina potion, but he was already over 60% stamina and didn't have enough to activate Diabolic thrust without passing out.
His final skill, Sky Father's Body, always made him pass out, but normally, by that point, nothing was left around him. It was a body refinement skill turned into an AOE attack.
Red stopped his run when he saw the exorcists fly back to heaven. Well, look at you, how did a living human get here?"
A cow demon with a sinister smile approached him.
"Hey, I want to drop down to the next ring. Do you know the way?" Red asked.
What he wanted was some nice, red-skinned imps to use for cultivation. He hoped he could find one that wouldn't mind a quickie with him.
"Sure thing for your soul. Come on, make the deal, I'll even throw in my protection. What do you say?"
"I'll find my way, thanks."
"Well, now aren't you a smart cookie?" The cow demon ran as a demon in a red suit stepped out of the shadows. "Alastor's the name, and helping people in need is my greatest passion. After seeing what you did to those angels, I feel indebted to you."
"Buy the rumor, sell the news. Is that close?" Red said.
"Exactly, not many would be crazy enough to use blessed weapons against the exorcists. To think a living soul would appear here, no one would believe it. But I have to ask, who are you, and what are you here for?"
"You may call me Red, my friends and enemies do. And I'm here on business, and my business is none of yours." Red said.
"What has you in a tizzy, friend Red? Why it's almost like you're weary of me and we've only just met."
"That cow demon ran screaming at the sight of you. But you're right, there is no reason we can't be friends. So tell me, friend Alastor, what's your deal?" Red said.
"Funny you should say that, I have many deals, many I could speak about, and a few I will, of course, keep private. I heard you wanted to get to the next ring, is that also none of my business?"
"I'm going to sleep with a local and achieve the first step on my grand plan for ultimate power," Red said.
"Ha, yes, if only it were so easy to gain power as sleeping with an imp. If that is what the man who ended extermination day early wants, follow me."
He went over his rewards and found the Title Angel Slayer at E-rank. A weapon capable of holding the title would do extra damage to angels up to E-rank. The exorcists were mainly E-rank, with Adam firmly in the D-rank. Alastor was also in the D-rank. While most sinners were E-ranks, it proved that if he wanted to get anywhere, he needed power. The first step was to gather Origin Energy to fuel his skills.