Bab 49: 47. The Strength of a Devil
A/N: 4656 words instead of the usual 1000. I was umm, feeling inspired towards the latter half.
.
.
.
Leviathan's Blood.
Captain Ophelia made those of us who studied medicine under her read about it intensively, mostly because a nationwide manhunt was occurring through the efforts of the Royal Army and Magic Council and all civil militia were called to participate should it be detected.
The drug itself was a product of alchemy, structurally similar to Phencyclidine, or PCP. The red tint from the powder earned its name Leviathan's Blood, a play on PCP's street name of Angel Dust.
At first, it was only treated as a variant of the drug, but as time went on the dangers of it became fully known. It didn't flush out of the system the way Angel Dust did, instead it acted more like LSD, coating the nervous system.
But unlike LSD, where you actively become more resistant to the drug's effects with repeated uses, Leviathan's Blood became stronger with repeated uses. It slowly suffused the user's nerves, seeping into them and filtering the effects in a way that increased the potency.
The average effects of PCP became more pronounced. It stopped just being a cocktail of stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and analgesics. It became a mutagenic.
It would twist and malform the abuser's bodily structure in an effort to make them more susceptible to the drug's increasingly heightened effects.
But the effects would wear off.
And so they'd keep taking it.
Inevitably, the difference between their sober selves and their self on Leviathan's Blood is too drastic for their psyche to think of any other alternative than to give this new self a separate identity. This identity would alter the mutations, the drug leeching off their subconscious in a way that baffles even the contracted alchemist from the country of Guiltina the crown and council hired to study it.
What previously could have been a twitching mess of muscle, bones, and nerves in the malformed imitation of a human would gain a retained shape. They could be more beautiful if they sought the sexual highs of the drug, their figure could gain an even stranger twist if they took it for the hallucinogenic effects.
But the most dangerous ones were those that drew pleasure from the feeling of invincibility.
Enhanced musculature, the inability to feel pain, and the constant euphoria that rushed through their minds made them into terrifying beasts in a fight. Even more so, the stronger their identity was.
The continental-wide hunt for the drug had died down within half a year of its start. The fear of the crown and councils' boots bursting down your door and the sheer dedication they had to hunt it down left and willing to sell it before willingly reporting the suppliers to the nearest Rune Knight.
Still, there was never any public report stating that they found the source of the drug. There was just a sudden stop in their distribution altogether.
Himura only ever had one case of a Leviathan's Blood user: Ito Himari.
This was before I had joined the guard myself as the Captain's ward. They had apparently managed to get her clean before it got too far, but it left a stain on one of the Elite's name.
Ito Daisuke was a good man and regularly sparred with Totomaru to see who was the better swordsman. Samurai versus ninja. But he was also the first of the guards to be killed by my mother the night HImura fell.
I didn't need a genius to tell me who the oni before me was. The same eyes, the same ears, the same swordsmanship, hell, even through the mutation she has the same dimples as her ever jovial father did.
But the red-skinned monstrosity that was trying its best to cut me to ribbons, with skill and speed equal to Totomaru and strength surmounting even my own, wasn't Ito Himari. It was the drug-fueled persona she had developed.
The purple-blue katana kept slashing apart my skin, the anti-magic blade cancelling out my healing as fast as I could activate it and tearing apart the seals I had placed on my body. The vicious snarling betrayed the precision at which she cut and sliced.
Frustration began to build up as the black wisteria vines that symbolized the seals grew over my limbs and thickened, almost completely covering my arms in their pitch-black ink.
I tried to dodge and weave, using all the footwork I could to try and find an angle I could use to cast a spell, throw a punch, anything, but she was too fast. Any spell or even attempt at a spell would be cancelled, and each opening I got would close with a twist of her sword.
I held my weight close, arms tucked in front of me as I tried my damndest to weave around the surgical swings, but she kept pushing me back.
"Die! Die! Die! All of you should just die!"
I leaned backwards as the oni swung upwards towards my ribs, only for her to turn the faint into a proper attack and leave a massive gash across my outstretched calf with a downward cleave.
I cursed while she smiled. The sight of my blood inspired her with confidence while I tried to get my body to start healing.
"Bleed sorcerer! Bleed devil! Bleed! Bleed!"
She levelled the sword with her chest before she thrust forward with all of her weight towards my heart. I sidestepped to my right, barely, ignoring the gush of blood from the cuts and gashes across my legs as I did so.
Seeing the opportunity, my left arm turned into a flaming stake before similarly driving towards her chest with intent to kill. She quickly withdrew her blade upwards and tried to deflect, the purple-blue katana cancelling my magic and driving its way into my wrist before being stopped by bone. Her brief surprise was all I needed for my other arm stabbed into her wrists.
"GRAAAHH! You! Demon! How dare you!"
I reached into the pouch on the back of my waist and pulled out three silver keys, "Open up, Gate of the Snake, Serpens!"
Three starry snakes sprung their way towards the injured and stunned swordswoman while I kicked the sword away and slammed my injured left hand into her chest, "Bind Snake!"
Black and red runic sigils spread across her body with one rune bearing the head of a serpent. She tried to struggle against the dark binds but they only got tighter in response to her efforts.
I levelled my right arm, still in the shape of a purple flaming stake, at her throat as I watched the celestial spirits' work to remove the drug from her body become visible. The swell of muscle on her body receded as the horn that grew out of her head fell off revealing an open wound on her forehead.
"H-How did you-!?"
"Daily bone density training. Daisuke was the one that taught me how to do them, Himari."
The now normal human woman seemed to snarl at my words. "Keep my father's name out of your mouth, monster!"
"He would be disappointed to see you no-"
"SHUT UP! You and that damned Captain are the reasons my father died! The reason our home was destroyed! I'll kill you both! I'll kill you and all other mages!"
"So that's what this is, huh? Enslaving and transforming the ones involved in the magic artifice trade, the etherion, the Magic Council, and that sword? It's all just part of some sort of anti-magic vendetta."
"I'm not going to answer any of yo-"
Before she could keep speaking I delivered a sharp punch across her jaw before kicking her over onto her back, my celestial spirits climbing their way onto my shoulders after having completely removed the drug from her body. I sighed as I felt the strain her body put against the dark bind spell I put on her, and took the opportunity to take stock of myself.
The seals have barely made any progress in reinstating themselves, and using my own magic reserves would drain me too much. Between healing myself, summoning and powering the celestial serpents, and all the failed spells, as well as the ones that have managed to turn the surrounding mountains into a violet hellscape, I've used about two-thirds of my magic power.
The last time I was this drained was when I was training with the Captain.
I looked at the thick blotches of black on my arms and decided to let the black magic seals fix themselves on their own by drawing on the ambient magic in the air. Trying to seal them myself would likely leave me with nothing left...
I kneeled over the mistake of a samurai below me and grabbed her chin. Both of us looked at each other with disgust, but I couldn't stop the slight smile growing on my face as she tried to look like she wasn't helpless.
"Listen, I don't really care about your goals or the goals of your little group, right now. I can deal with all of you later. I came here for a good fight to clear my head, but instead, I found a disgusting rat using slaves to perpetuate her dirty work. I don't like slavery. So I'm going to hurt you. But before I do, you're going to be a good girl and tell me where you were using to control them all and what the passphrase to release them is. And then you're going to scream."
She just continued to stare at me, not being a good girl at all, when I heard the sound of a sharp crack coming from inside her mouth. She smiled as I frowned, and even began laughing as I wrenched her jaw open to see what just happened.
There, resting on top of a tongue piercing, was a small blue cracked lacrima. It began to glow in a steady rhythm, sending out a signal to something. I tried to cancel it out, but the whirling of ethernano told me that whatever message was just sent got an immediate response.
But even more concerning was the sudden rise of curse power I felt in the same direction.
The manic cackling below me rose even more as the energies coalesced. Himari's eyes had previously once been bloodshot with anger were now twisted with insanity.
"What's so funny?"
"You think that Beestenbloed's greatest strength is some drugged-up fighter!? WE'RE MONSTER TAMERS! From goblins to wyverns, humans to beasts! Anything and everything will fall under our control, even demons from the Books of Zeref! Even if we can't control it, it will be used and thrown aside like any other toy!"
The earth shook as a mighty roar echoed out from the magic gateway, causing my hackles to rise in tandem with the presence of curse energy.
The whirling mass of magic began to part as a gigantic claw and skull of an armoured bipedal monster hulked its way into existence.
The dinosaur-like demon was easily fifty feet tall and seventy feet long. Its hunched-over frame carried a gigantic carapace that covered it from the head to the end of its massive tail, and its head itself was almost entirely maw and nothing else, built solely for the purpose of devouring.
And it was exactly that.
Built.
It was wrong.
It shouldn't exist.
It's one of Zeref's creations!
It shouldn't exist!
I stomped on the laughing face below me as I rose. The portal began to close behind the demon, and it roared again before turning its head slightly to look around. I locked eyes with it even as it ignored me.
Then it began to rampage.
It tore apart the landscape with its body as a battering ram, using its horns as a plough to rip out the ground before charging in a particular direction.
West.
Towards the city of Era.
Towards the Magic Council.
But I didn't care.
It was going to die, and I would kill anyone that got in my way.
Even if they're a fucking Wizard Saint.
"Hahaha! What are you hesitating for!? Scared!? You should be! The Tarrasque is-"
"Disgusting."
I kicked her as hard in the jaw as I could, easily knocking her out with finality before closing the gates of my spirits and walking towards the monster.
"O strengthen of arm to cleave the heavens, O might of hide that defends against the heavens, O swift wind that dashes through the heavens. Arms. Armour. Vernier."
With a tricast enchant that cast a purple glow around me, I felt my body get lighter, harder, and stronger and rushed towards the Tarrasque.
The destroyed terrain fit right at home with the purple flames, purple flames that I hated. I was once capable of creating beautiful and intricate figures out of flame without using maker magic, but that fine control was ripped from me when all of my offensive fire magic was turned into devil slayer magic.
But at this moment, it all felt perfect.
I didn't want to have the fine control over flame I used to have.
I just wanted to kill this mistake. To kill a creation of Zeref. To kill an entity that was given life by the person that Jellal worships. To destroy a life while mine feels like it was in a perpetual spiral.
Beestenbloed enslaved civilians.
I can't stand by that. But it wasn't my hunt.
But now they're using Zeref's demons.
And I love the idea of killing anything related to Zeref.
The idea of seeing them all burning and hearing them all screaming and smelling them char made my heart beat in excitement and a smile grow on my face.
But the Tarrasque's carapace was magic reflective. That was its Curse.
It wasn't intelligent enough to cast one like a spell, but it had one inbuilt.
If I wanted to kill it, I had to break it down with my bare hands.
All one hundred thirty tons of it.
The only way I knew was thanks to the powers of the devil slayer magic. The knowledge of curses was laid bare to me, the negative emotions that fuelled them being natural knowledge.
It was like having a cheat sheet for an extremely hard test that no one else knew how to study for.
Maybe it wasn't the devil slayer magic specifically. Maybe it was a natural part of being a demon.
But I refuse to call myself a demon.
It's what my mother would want.
As I sprinted after the Tarrasque, studying its features and trying to find a weakness, I was unaware of the seals becoming undone once again.
The Tarrasque was heavily armoured on every part of its body. Even if its underbelly looked softer, it didn't mean it would be easier. The only thing I could do was punch it. Hard.
My skin itched in anticipation.
Once I had caught up, I jumped and grabbed onto its wildly swinging tail. With a straight shot upwards, I flickered in a flash of flame several dozen metres above its head. The sight was truly captivating. Destruction one end, fit with purple flames and cloudy ships destroying everything, and a beautiful mountainous pass leading to the apex of magical civilization in Fiore. And below me, a monster that shouldn't deserve to exist.
I stretched my palms up to the sky and released an explosive gout that erased all blue from the sky and twisted as I sent myself rocketing towards the demon below me. With a punch that sounded like a crack of lightning, the Tarrasque's charge was instantly halted as it was sent crashing against the terrain.
Its carapace was undamaged, yet my arm went completely numb.
I smiled.
I landed on top of its prone form below releasing a series of blows, pummeling into its body as hard and as fast as I could without seeing a single dent in its carapace. The monster stood up and began to rampage again, trying to throw me off. Instead of letting it, I jumped up and clung to the cliffside.
That was a bad decision.
Its tail was swinging wildly before, but its senses were more keen than I had anticipated. With expert precision, the barbed tail crushed me into the rock before swinging again, the tail's swing cleaved through the stone and batted me out of its surface. My body was sent hurling before crashing into the ground half a kilometre away.
My bones were practically gelatin. My muscles were in opposite positions and organs that shouldn't have been punctured were.
But I was still smiling.
The ethereal blue flames that usually manifested when I was injured erupted without hesitation this time, instantly rearranging me into proper shape. My blood was pumping as I pulled myself out of the hole I was in.
I swept the hair that had matted itself to my body out of the way, stopping when my hands brushed against familiar keratin. The demonic horns that only appear after the first two of my genetic seals are gone, blood and bone, are standing prominently on my forehead catching the wild hair I tried to pull off my face.
I smiled.
The sound of sizzling echoed around me as the black blood that had tried to stain my body evaporated. My body was boiling, my rage indistinguishable, my disgust rising, and my enjoyment of the moment rising higher and higher.
Taking a deep breath, I felt my pores open up eagerly accepting more ethernano into my body to fill up my reservoirs. And then, I rushed, closing the five-hundred-metre gap between me and my prey with ease.
Once again its charge towards the capital was stopped as I slammed myself as a fiery comet into its head from behind, causing it to flip under its own weight and speed.
I didn't hesitate and grabbed the two horns outstretched from its head-like handles and began to spin in place before throwing them upwards. I could feel the muscles in my arm swell and condense as the bone seal fully revealed my demonic nature and reared back for a punch.
I didn't care if I was losing control over the seals. I didn't care about anything at this moment.
I was getting what I signed up for this job for. I fight that could kill me. A wall to blindly throw myself against without thinking.
No slavery. No Magic Council. No Phantom Lord. No Fairy Tail. No Jellal.
Just something to punch.
And something that punches back.
The Tarrasque swung at me with its claws on its way down, but I grabbed it with my right arm and pulled, swinging my prepared left fast into its skull and the smile that was on my became sadistic when I heard an infinitely small crack.
The thunderous echo that came from the punch was drowned out by the sound of a mountain being broken into as the behemoth crashed into it. I began bouncing on my feet as adrenaline spiked through my body.
Exhilaration came with equal parts clarity with that punch. This is more than what I wanted. This is more than what I needed. This is what I was made for.
The black marks around my arms and legs began to harden, meaning the flesh seal was becoming undone as well. But I didn't care. I embraced the feeling of the harder skin even as my bones shifted to more bestial shapes and a budding pressure began to emerge on my lower back where a thick tail began to burst forward.
The Tarrasque burst out of the dust cloud with a roar and open maw as it tried to bite me. I grabbed onto its teeth and jaws, forcing it to keep its mouth open even as it rammed into the mountains again and again to force me into its gullet.
I struggled, its strength well above my own but sheer stubbornness kept me from letting it win.
When I saw its tongue stretch towards me, I opened my mouth and began to scorch its throat as far down as possible. It screeched in agony and threw me out of its jaws, my wings bursting forth to keep me in the air.
I took a moment to delight in its screaming as it was the first time I heard it react in pain. Slowly, I undid the last of my seals manually. The world blurred as a third eye formed itself on my forehead, but then everything came into crystal clear focus.
The sight of souls all across the land was astonishing in of itself, but the depth at which I could see with my Mind's Eye made everything pale in comparison to what it usually is. The rules of human perception felt stripped.
The nature of the universe's structure, the way quarks make up protons, neutrons, and electrons, and how they make up atoms and how they make up molecules and how ethernano and curses and spiria interact with it all, how they can all be influenced however I want for the purpose of alchemy.
I saw everything, or rather, I could have.
The universe was laid bare for me, but my purpose was entirely dedicated to finding the best and most fun way to tear apart my enemy. The crack I had managed to make with my punch stuck out to me like a sore thumb, and I was stubbornly determined to remove the entire carapace before I killed it.
But it was too durable. Sure, my devil slayer magic makes most curses useless against me, but it was too strong to burn in any way. So I did what was reasonable.
I hit it again.
But harder.
Once again I propelled myself with an explosion that consumed more of the sky than the previous. My fist connected with the carapace exactly where the small crack was, forcing it to spiderweb even more.
It began to throw itself around in response to the impact that jerked it around again, forcing me to drive my claws into the cracks as it began to throw itself around, willingly bashing itself into the mountains in a raged effort to crush me.
I dug my claws deeper and deeper before I began pulling. Every muscle in my body burned in the effort as blue flames licked at the wounds that kept forming from the thrashing and bashing.
Piece by piece I tore off the pesky carapace until its skin was completely exposed to me.
The sight of its primary strength literally being stripped off filled me with glee as I finally let go and flew upwards out of its reach. It roared in frustration before trying to shovel a bunch of boulders to launch at me with its tail.
But they all missed by a large margin. Obviously.
The beast couldn't aim them in any way and I had plenty of familiarity with flying using both flames and wings. When I was high enough I forced my arms to change, the muscles in each squelching and retracting into my body until only a third was left in each while my flesh was pushed outwards with the remaining two-thirds on both sides causing four new arms to begin to form, scales and bone following suit.
The naked Tarrasque roared up at me as I smiled in delight at its frustration. I clapped my hands together in front of me, creating three orbs of roaring flame between each pair.
"Fire Devil Lord's Morning Star."
The three orbs all combined into one that I held aloft with all six hands. It began to grow as every edeas of magic power I could draw from was pumped into it, even as my pores opened up to accept more from the surrounding environment.
It grew larger and larger, easily the size of a large house, and was hot enough to dry out the flora around us and melt the snow at the mountaintops from below.
Then, with a gentle shove, it eagerly moved towards the Tarrasque that screamed and roared as it tried to find some way to destroy me. But it couldn't.
Its death cry tore through the former valley loud enough that I know the people back in Era heard it, while the flying inferno greedily consumed every part save its head which it through to the side on instinct as it tried to protect itself with its nonexistent carapace.
The sight.
The sound.
The smell.
It was all greater than I could have predicted.
But it took everything I had left and forced me to float back to the ground with lethargy. I slowly made the hike back to the samurai I left unconscious and smiled when I saw her shaking and quaking in fear. She wasn't stuck by a bind snake anymore.
She was paralysed by pure fear.
The shadow that was cast on the ground made me remember that this form, my true form that bore the true regalness of my existence was towering, twice my usual height, at ten feet and eight inches, minus the horns which stood out prominently.
My six arms flexed as I stared at her hungrily, each one being only a third of what my full physical strength could be but easily as strong as that pathetic drug she called on for strength could ever give her.
I hesitated for a moment before my face was split in half in a toothy grin that made her sweat even more. I spoke, my voice deep and smoky and carrying a decisive timber.
"I planned to get information out of you the fun way. Skinning you alive and healing you. Over and over and over again until this whole mountainside was covered in jackets made from your flayed flesh," I said as marched over her trembling form, "But someone was a bad girl~. Made me use up all of my magic before I could teach you a lesson. Now I'll have to do something else~."
"W-What are you!?"
"Oh forgive me. I know you're name but I never told you my proper one." My smile grew wider as I gently picked her up, cradling her in my arms like a child while one hand rested behind her head and easily matched it in size. "From now and until the end of your miserable existence, you will refer to me as Aetna and nothing else."
"The Overlord..." she muttered as her eyes went wide with realization. Pride filled me as she realized my proper position above her, and her instant struggle made my heart melt as she knew that my holding her was above what a dog like her warranted, but I was doing it anyway.
I just knew that from the way she looked at me with fear right now the look that was going to emerge in a second would just be absolutely adorable~.
"That's right," I cooed, "Your Overlord. But I told you to address me as Aetna. Now say it."
"I will never do what you wa-YMM!" Her useless defiance was silenced with a yip as I gripped her jaw shut with a vice grip.
"I said say it."
"A-Aetna."
"Good girl~," I said as her quivering made a warmth bloom in my chest. My hand touching her head began to glow as a golden watery substance began to emerge from it. "Now, in lew of your planned punishment, I will have no choice but to show you Paradise."
I activated the curse, copying from her all the memories about Beestenbloed I could as well as the information about the ring. In exchange, I shared with her every memory I had of every injury I was inflicted with in piercing clarity.
While the knowledge of the guild was pleasant to have, I smiled knowing her screams and cries that followed would serenade me to sleep for years to come~
.
.
.
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone