Lucian floated high above the canyon, his dark wings beating lazily as he watched. Below him, the smoke from Bols's explosion was dying down. The ground was scarred with fresh craters, and the scent of flesh, scorched earth, and vaporized stone hung thick in the air. The heat of the blast had melted portions of the canyon, turning solid rock into sluggishly dripping obsidian.
But Lucian wasn't looking at the scenic devastation, regardless of how impressive it was. His silver and crimson eyes were locked on three very specific targets amidst the ash.
"Ah, my powers... I never doubted you for a single second," he chuckled to himself, the sound lost to the roaring wind. He had thought that his powers had just dropped him off somewhere since he didn't appear in front of what he wanted, but now here was everything he was looking for.
With a sudden burst of speed, he flapped his wings and shot downward like a fallen star. The wind roared violently in his ears, flattening his purple hair against his skull, but he didn't slow his descent, he was not going to take any chance here.
He knew that even with his enhanced reflexes and observation Haki, a single second of hesitation with a person of this caliber would cost him his narrow window of opportunity. Even if he could fight her and get what he wanted, he really, really didn't want to fight Akame right now.
Yes, he had come to this world specifically for Phantasmagoria. But his powers had dropped him directly into the climax of a chaotic clash between Night Raid and the Jaegers. Leaving without the two most legendary blades in this timeline, and whatever other loose Teigu he could scavenge, would be a criminal waste of a good crisis.
His eyes locked onto Akame. Specifically, the long, elegant hilt of Murasame resting quietly at her waist.
As he tore through the rising smoke with speed, he didn't fail to notice the change in the girl immediately. Akame's instincts were good. Her crimson eyes snapped upward, tracking the incoming blur with terrifying speed. For a fraction of a second, confusion flickered across her pale face. This winged boy wasn't anyone she recognized, but her body reacted instantly, her hand snapping toward the hilt of her blade with a speed surpassing the mortal eye.
She was fast. Incredibly fast. But Lucian had spent months training in the One Piece world and had grown stronger. Even as a low class, he had been way faster than a normal human, as a mid class now, and with all his training, he was far faster than her, and his training with Raum also gave him something to help. Magic.
With a flick of his wrist, a magic circle materialized in the air directly in front of him. "Glaciate!" he muttered.
A flash of cold energy erupted around Akame's legs and arms, instantly encasing her limbs in ice. It wasn't strong enough to hold a physical powerhouse like her for long, though in the next heartbeat, the ice shattered into sparkling shards under her physical strength, but that split second of complete immobilization was all Lucian needed.
He swept past her, pushing her as he passed by. His hand darted down and snatched Murasame clean out of its scabbard. In the same fluid motion, he snatched the unconscious, heavily bleeding Leone off the ground, his fingers hooking under the golden belt of her Teigu, Lionel, and ripping it straight off her waist as he hoisted her limp body over his shoulder.
The moment he righted himself in the air, he turned. Akame was already airborne, her face a mask of cold fury as she lunged at him barehanded, her fingers curled like talons. Damn, this girl was not one for hesitation.
With a grin, Lucian simply tossed Leone's body directly into the assassin's path. Akame didn't flinch, but her priorities instantly shifted. She aborted her strike, twisting her body in mid-air to catch her falling comrade safely, absorbing the impact as they hit the dirt.
By the time Akame landed on the cracked earth, Lucian had already blasted back up into the safety of the sky, hovering just out of reach of any ground attacks. He giggled, looking at the legendary poison blade in one hand and Leone's golden belt hanging from his fingers.
"Two down," Lucian said cheerfully, as he summoned his gate and tossed them in. "Now to get the others."
Without waiting for Akame's retaliation, he unfurled his wings and shot toward the eastern forest, leaving the ruined canyon behind him.
A few kilometers away, the canopy of the forest was a blur of dark green as Chelsea ran, her lungs burning, her face pale, and her heart hammering against her ribs.
Her assassination attempt had failed. She had stabbed Kurome in the neck with her poison needle, yet the girl had stood back up, entirely unbothered by what should have been an instantly fatal strike.
Kurome was a monster.
A deeply angry, heavily drugged, biologically modified monster.
Behind her, Chelsea could hear the rapid, heavy rustling of leaves. Kurome was closing the distance with terrifying speed, her presence radiating a suffocating desire for murder. The only reason she even made it this far was that the girl seemed to still be suffering from overuse of her teigu, which had given Chelsea a head start, but that was still not going to save her, it seemed.
She hurriedly brought out her teigu as she ran, wanting to use it to transform. Suddenly, a flash of steel cut through the dim forest light. Chelsea barely managed to twist her body out of the way. Kurome's blade missed her throat but sliced clean through her right hand. Blood sprayed onto the bright green foliage as several of her fingers went flying into the brush.
"Ahhh!" Chelsea screamed, stumbling and crashing to her knees as she clutched her bleeding hand to her chest.
The small cosmetic case she was clutching slipped from her grasp. Gaia's foundation tumbled through the air, falling toward the forest ground.
Chelsea's eyes widened with sheer horror.
But suddenly, a magic circle flared in the path of the falling box. Instantly, a dense sphere of water materialized around the cosmetic case, catching it mid-air and suspending it harmlessly within a floating bubble.
"What?" Chelsea gasped, freezing in her tracks as she stared at the floating water.
Before Kurome could understand what had just happened, a dark blur descended from the canopy above like a falling anvil.
BOOM!
The ground shattered, dirt, leaves, and wood chips flying in a violent shockwave that stripped the nearby trees of their foliage. Lucian landed directly between the two girls, his demonic wings flaring to absorb the impact.
Before the dazed Kurome could raise her blade, Lucian's hand shot out. He gripped her face in a vice-like hold, his fingers digging into her skull, and slammed her head-first into the dirt.
The earth exploded beneath the impact, carving a shallow crater into the forest floor.
"Gah!" Kurome shrieked, her legs flailing wildly as her face was ground into the mud.
Lucian didn't give her a single second to recover. He pinned her down with his knee, grabbed her right arm, and twisted it with force.
CRACK.
A sickening pop echoed through the clearing. Kurome screamed in absolute agony as her elbow joint bent at an unnatural, grotesque angle. Her fingers instantly lost their strength, and her legendary blade, Yatsufusa, slipped from her grasp.
Lucian caught the sword by the hilt before it could hit the ground, then casually kicked Kurome's ribcage, sending her rolling across the dirt until she crashed heavily into the trunk of a massive oak tree.
Lucian ignored both of them, stepping back to let the water bubble pop. Phantasmagoria fell gently into his waiting palm.
"Hehehehe... mission complete," Lucian giggled, his shoulders trembling with sheer, unadulterated excitement. He clutched the cosmetic box and the sword to his chest like a child who had just received everything on his Christmas list.
Suddenly, his Observation Haki pulsed, warning him of an incoming strike from behind.
Without looking, Lucian leaped backward, flying into the air with a lazy beat of his wings. A throwing knife whistled through the exact space his throat had occupied a millisecond prior.
He looked down to see Kurome, her face smeared with blood, dirt, and tears, clutching her broken arm as she glared up at him with a look of pure, murderous hatred.
'They really are sisters,' he thought.
Lucian just gave her a smug, cheeky grin. He raised Yatsufusa in one hand and Gaia's foundation in the other, crossing them in a mock salute.
"Nice try, but I'll be taking these," he said cheekily. "Thanks for the souvenirs! Don't worry, I'll take real good care of them."
With a sudden burst of speed, he shot straight up through the canopy and vanished into the clouds, leaving the forest silent once more.
Kurome stood in the clearing, her breathing ragged, her body trembling from pain and utter humiliation. Her sword was gone. Her puppets, the "friends" she had left in this miserable world, were sealed away in a sword that now belonged to an unknown thief.
A guttural, primal snarl escaped her lips. She slowly turned her head, her dark, empty eyes locking onto Chelsea, who was clutching her bleeding, fingerless hand.
Chelsea's face went entirely pale. "Oh... oh no."
Even with a broken arm and no weapon, Kurome was an elite, biologically augmented Imperial assassin. Chelsea, while an assassin, didn't really have any combat skills to speak of. She stood absolutely no chance.
The forest echoed with a brief, brutal struggle before falling deathly quiet.
Back at the Jaegers' Headquarters in the Capital
Esdeath sat behind her desk, her fingers steepling as she listened to the report. The moment they had gotten back from the mission, she had called all those of her team who were still alive to give their report and tell her what happened.
Kurome stood before her, her head bowed low, her right arm bound tightly in a clean white sling. The girl's voice was flat and emotionless, but Esdeath, with her sharp senses, could hear the underlying current of grief over Bols's death and the burning humiliation of losing her teigu.
Esdeath dismissed her, telling her to rest and recover with Wave and the others. Once the doors clicked shut, the General leaned back in her chair, a slow, predatory smile spreading across her beautiful face.
Truthfully? She wasn't particularly bothered by the loss, she was annoyed, yes, and disappointed, but as she always said, the weak die and the strong live.
In her eyes, if a warrior was weak enough to have their weapon stolen from them, they deserved the loss. The weak die, and the strong survive, that was the law of nature. Though she would also be lying if she said she didn't feel something for those she had come to regard as her own.
But what genuinely fascinated her was the thief.
Wave's report from the canyon had matched Kurome's perfectly. A purple-haired youth with strange, mismatched eyes, capable of flight, who now seemed to have had disarmed both Akame and Kurome in a single afternoon. To do that required a level of strength and audacity at the very least.
Esdeath gripped the hilt of her rapier, her blue eyes shining with an icy, manic excitement.
"To attack both Night Raid and my Jaegers so casually... You must be incredibly confident in your strength. I hope you try to steal from me next, little thief. I want to see what color your blood is when you die," she whispered, her chest rising with a sharp, delighted breath.
DxD World.
Lucian sat cross-legged on his dusty, long-neglected bed. It was the same bed he hadn't slept in since he made his very first jump. Even when he came back for brief times, he didn't sleep on the bed, he always just slept on the couch until he went back.
Laid out on the faded sheets before him were his prizes from his recent 'shopping' run. Murasame, Yatsufusa, Lionel, and the sleek cosmetic case of the Gaea Foundation.
"I... I guess this is it," he muttered to the empty room.
For once, his face wasn't split by a cocky, punchable grin that he normally had after he got what he was after. He felt a strange, cold knot of anxiety tightening in his stomach, which made it a little hard to breathe. Maybe it was because now that he had what he needed to start making moves in his own world, things were now starting to feel real in a way.
When he was in the One Piece world, it hadn't felt entirely real. He had treated the world like a sandbox, that and knowing his contract shielded him during deals, and that he could always retreat if things went south.
But this world, the DxD universe, it was his default world. His power had made it clear that no matter where he traveled, this was his anchor. There was no escaping DxD, he'd always come back, even if it was just for a short while.
And this world was terrifying. High-class devils who could erase entire cities with a wave of their hand, beings far greater than even those roaming the world, and even enemies that lived just beyond his quiet, rural border, and he wasn't joking about that.
The village he lived in was one of the outer ones that were by the fallen angel territory, so he was quite literally living by the side of one of his enemies as a devil, and that alone was bad news.
Sure, he had the raw power of a high-mid class devil now, capable of destroying a city with raw magic, but he lacked the centuries of combat a lot of others had and the political backing that the noble houses possessed, despite being of blood, one of the great clans.
One slip, one arrogant mistake, and he would lose his life.
He took a deep, steadying breath to clear his head. He should not think like this. He had the resources now. He had eighty-one Devil Fruits and four powerful Teigu in his gate and tons of gold.
He had the resource to grow, he knew how to adapt, and now he was going to go out there and build something of his own. He had all this before he went to Akame ga kill even.
He just needed to make sure no one saw him since he was weak. He needed to operate in the shadows without drawing the eyes of the Greater beings.
And now he could.
With a thought, he swept his hand over the bed, sending the two cursed blades and the golden belt back into his Gate. Only the Gaea Foundation remained, resting quietly on the sheets.
Lucian reached out, his fingers brushing the polished surface of the cosmetic box. He smiled, his confidence rushing back. "Now... let's see what you can really do."
He flipped the box open. Inside lay rows of delicate brushes, fine powders, glowing creams, and vibrant paints. They looked like ordinary makeup.
He carefully picked up one of the fine brushes.
He closed his eyes,
"Here we go".
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