"Bella, what are you doing?" Altair asked the animagus.
The sound of meowing and scratching did not diminish at all. Two black cats were locked in a fight. Altair noticed with some surprise that his mother was losing.
"Petrificus Totalus," he conjured at the invading cat.
The spell hit its target. But it didn't work. The cat looked at him suspiciously as she moved away from Bella.
'Too human,' he thought when he saw the cat's eyes. The Legilimency was effective for only a few seconds, but that was enough to reveal the cat's identity. She seemed to smell everything and left in a hurry.
'Chaos Brigade,' thought Altair. An organization he knew only by name.
"Meow!" he heard his mother say.
"I know, it wasn't an ordinary cat," he replied.
"Meow, meow, meow!" Then he had to listen to Bella's rant about the intruder. The cat had sneaked into the sanctuary, evading all the magical protections that Lily and he had put in place.
Altair thought about improving those protections. It wasn't nice to know that anyone could enter their home. Even if they had the protection of the devils, it wasn't a guarantee. They couldn't trust them completely.
He had studied a little devil magic. It was... cruder than the magic they taught at Hogwarts. They wasted a lot of magic on simple spells.
It wasn't the work of a brute, far from it, but it was considerably less refined than what he knew.
It had an advantage in power. The attack spells were much more powerful. But they would have difficulty transforming a mouse into a box of matches.
If he could find a middle ground between the two, he could be superior to any other wizard who had ever lived, including Merlin. However, that didn't mean everything in the supernatural world.
He still had to increase his power—and needed girls for that.
He had been sharing tea with Sona. The girl always put a chessboard on the table, and they competed. She seemed obsessed with beating him. He let her, which frustrated her greatly. She wanted to beat him, not be handed a victory. But her pout when she looked at him angrily was too good to pass up the opportunity to tease her.
He could understand Serafall.
Business was booming, with only three hundred kilograms left to complete the bet with Rias. The girl had said that at first she wanted to find another way to pay the bet. But now that she was his, she wouldn't mind becoming his queen, not a bishop.
At first, he wanted to make Lavender his queen. But it was the girl herself who advised against it, knowing that she wasn't powerful enough to be a useful queen for him. Most of the girls in his coven served as pawns, and he didn't like that. If he could, he would transfor, all the pieces for bishops for each of them.
Something he could certainly do, but not at that moment. Doing so could upset the devils, but in the future, with more power, it would be possible.
The consequences of taking Rias' virginity were palpable. Although not as much as might be expected. The Phenex family canceled the marriage contract. Instead of Rias being Riser's wife, they wanted her to be a mere concubine.
Zoeticus Gremory was so furious with Rias that he almost agreed, but Venelana, Rias's mother, had to intervene. Accepting that deal would mean admitting submission to the Phenex family.
Altair remembered the day he met Riser and cursed Lavender a little in his mind.
"You're uglier than the great Riser," the man remarked with his shirt unbuttoned. He had dirty blond hair. He was attractive, like most devils.
Grayfia was there, her presence supposed to serve as a peacemaker between the two sides. Although she looked at Altair angrily, she did not intervene at all. He remembered the kiss she gave to his cock.
"I don't see what's so great," Altair replied. "Although Rias did see it. Not in Riser, of course," he added at the end, mockingly.
"You're a newcomer, the bastard half-breed of a devil from Old Satan's faction. You're nothing compared to the Phenex family. There's nothing to hold you up," the man said with pride in his voice.
"My two feet have been enough," Altair was not intimidated by the man. He could feel that he was stronger, but not by an overwhelming difference as one might expect. He was supposed to be low-class while Riser was high-class, but it wasn't that noticeable.
Altair knew that the mixture of ordinary magic and devil magic made him stronger.
He estimated that when he reached the middle class, he would be as strong as a high-class member in the underworld.
And he had another card to play against Riser in the form of a magic sword he was learning to use. Kiba was good at teaching, although he remained distant and courteous.
"Your two feet won't save you from the greatness of the great Riser," Altair wondered why he was speaking in the third person.
"Your harem seems more impressive than you," said Lavender next to Altair.
The girls were behind the man, a total of fourteen. All dressed in a way that only a fetishist could dress them.
Riser's gaze turned to the blonde, looking her up and down with approval. He looked at Altair with greater respect in his eyes.
"The half-breed's taste isn't so bad," said the blond. "You messed with Rias."
"Yes," he replied with a serious face. "So what?" he asked.
"She was promised to Riser," a sweet voice interjected. A blonde girl next to Riser seemed to share the same blood. "That's a disgrace to the House of Phenex. We wonder how you will compensate us."
"I have no intention of compensating anyone," said Altair. The girl frowned.
"A Rating Game," said the blonde girl.
"And Riser will keep her," Riser pointed at Lavender.
Altair was about to refuse that price.
"And Altair will keep her," Lavender pointed at the girl next to Phenex.
"What?" the blonde girl squealed, her face blushing as she looked at Altair. She quickly looked away. "Ni-san, no!"
"Riser accepts," he interrupted his sister.
"The Rating Game will be in one month from today," was Grayfia's first intervention; she seemed to want to hurry. She looked at Altair with pity in her eyes. She had no faith in him.
"Ni-san, why?" The girl looked hurt.
"Riser Phenex will not lose," was all the blond man said.
Altair regretted telling Akeno that maybe Riser wasn't so bad.
After the man left, encouraged by Grayfia, only he and Lavender remained.
"What the hell was that?" he asked angrily.
He could have called the whole thing off and canceled the Rating Game. However, doing so would also mean ruining his reputation. If he wanted a place in the underworld, he had to keep his word.
"I trust my boyfriend. You said you could beat him, didn't you?" she said sweetly.
Lavender knew that talking to him like that would soften him up.
"I'd bet on myself, of course, but the odds of losing aren't zero," he said sincerely. He needed the sacred magic to counteract Phenex's regeneration.
"You know I'll never be anyone else's, Alti," she said before turning away.
That shameless woman was punished later. Altair couldn't let the women in his coven do whatever they wanted without consequences.
Too bad, Lavender enjoyed it.
The conversation with Riser was two days ago.
If anything good came out of all that, it was that he got his evil pieces sooner than expected. Serafall would deliver them tomorrow.
Mana (Evans): 62,752.
By sleeping with his coven, he had managed to passively increase his magical power by more than a thousand units, although much of it was due to Rias and Akeno. More from the second one, since the first one was in the underworld most of the time.
It seems that only Serafall's intervention stopped the Gremorys from going after him. Which, curiously, included Sirchesz, who was angry with him.
But in the same way, the Gremory family supported him, that's why Kiba helped him training. He had to win, or the heiress would dishonor herself by changing a strong man of high birth for a weak half-breed.
The way [Dual Cultivation] worked was to increase Wis, Int, and Soul points. Every time he slept with someone, it wasn't as if it was certain to increase, no. There was a bottleneck that he broke through. The stats increased in such a way that they balanced out.
At the beginning, they were:
Intelligence: 146 (+: 102,400)
Wisdom: 144 (+: 51,200)
Soul: 176 (+: 51,200)
They became:
Intelligence: 148 (+: 102,400)
Wisdom: 148 (+: 51,200)
Soul: 176 (+: 51,200)
Soul did not increase at all; it was as if the other two stats were being pushed to equal the strongest stat.
Ring! Ring!
His phone rang, an unknown number.
"Hello?"
"Hello, we want to invite you to Gregory," he heard a male voice on the other end.
He hung up immediately.
The phone continued to ring.