บท 63: Contract Goes Awry

After school, Issei once again went to the Occult research club. He waited for all of his fellow devil comrades to come together, as Rias would only give out tasks when everyone was together. Today no one would go out for contracts or flyer duty, rather, they would go exterminate a stray devil.

Issei watched as Akeno used magic to create a teleportation seal. He wasn't too impressed with such a low level application of space magic. Not only did her teleportation seal take a while to create, after the group used it, Issei learned that the teleportation itself took time. Unlike his dimensional gates which could allow people to cross through instantaneously, her teleportation seal would slowly transfer the body from bottom to top.

When Issei made it to the other side of the teleportation seal, he found himself outside of an abandoned building. There, Rias explained the evil pieces system to him. However, since he had the system to explain his Promotion, he could more or less guess what each piece did.

When the group entered the building, they were confronted with a horrible abomination that looked like a beautiful naked woman from her torso to her head, but her lower body was that of a monster.

Issei was told to just stand back and watch as his peers fought of the monster. The monster made its move first by… squeezing its breasts, to shoot acid at Issei and company. Everyone moved out of the way, dodging the disgusting attack, and Kiba countered with impressive speed. Thanks to his status as a Knight, he took off at close to supersonic levels and directly cut off the monster's two arms.

Then the monster charged up to Koneko and used what looked to be a mouth on its monstrous lower body to eat her. Issei was worried for a second and almost left Rias' side to help Koneko, but he noticed that she was fine. She used her inhuman levels of strength as a Rook to pry open the monster's mouth.

With the monster being held down by Koneko, Kiba managed to bisect the monster's two polar opposite body structures. Now that the weak top half of the monster lost her combat prowess, she knew that she had been doomed to die today. Rias said "Any last words?"

The monster responded "Just finish me of..."

Rias looked at Akeno and said "Do it."

Through the use of magic, Akeno created a set of priestess clothes and summoned demonic thunder to vaporize the soul of the monster. She then cancelled this "transformation" and went back into her school clothes.

After the battle, Issei judged that his fellow devils were pretty good. Though, they certainly could do better. Just going off the power structure that the system explained, they were all at least at the High Class Devil Rank. Rias was the only one who didn't fight, so Issei couldn't judge her strength.

The group cleaned up the scene of any evidence that a battle had taken place there and used another teleportation seal to go back to the Occult Research Club. The battle was over quite quickly, so Issei had enough time to complete his final workout; today was the day he would unseal his Cloning and Personal Dimension skills.

After a long and hard workout, Issei took a shower and unlocked his two most overpowered training skills. Once they were unsealed, Issei trained his cloning skill to the point where he could use ten clones. Now that he was in a new universe his avatar would get its own personal dimension and since that was the case, Issei had to start building his personal dimension back up from scratch.

At the moment there was only about 100 square meters of space available to him, but that was more than enough for ten clones. With his clones in his dimension training his demonic and holy energy manipulation and his body focusing solely on body refining while under gravity, his progress was absurd to say the least.

In a single night of training, Issei crossed over to the threshold for High Class Nephilim. He would have gone further beyond, but his bloodlines were now "restraining" his growth. Now that he had become a perfect half devil and half angel, he would need both energies at the same level of control to Rank up. Furthermore, his Chaosfiend and Fiendgod bloodlines made it impossible for him to rank up if his body was not at the peak of his current rank as well; to summarize, he needed to have all his stats maxed to increase his rank.

At the High Class Nephilim Rank, Issei gained a new form called the Nephilim True Body. Back when he first met his fellow devils, they showed that they were devils by assuming their Devil True Bodies and manifesting bat-like demonic wings. Back then, Issei's own devil bloodline had been stimulated and his wings also manifested, but it seems that after becoming a Nephilim, he had lost that form.

Now, his form had return when he advanced as a testament to the bloodline's power; the stronger a bloodline, the harder it would be to awaken its unique traits. His new Nephilim True Body gave him a pair of white holy-light infused bat wings that were much larger than when he was a devil.

…

After another day of school, Issei once again went to the Occult Research Club to see if the system would kindly give him some free shop points. For today, there was a contract for Issei to do. Unfortunately, the system had no reaction.

Issei took the mission just to experience what contracts between devils and humans involved. He had more than enough magic and control to use the contract summoning seal, so Issei thanked Akeno for preparing him one and was teleported away. When he reached the other side, he found himself in a dark room with an eerie atmosphere.

Issei could smell the scent of fresh blood in the air, so he knew that the situation might become serious in mere moments. He prepared himself to confront whatever was behind the door to room that emanated that horrible stench and kicked the door open.

Before his eyes, there were bodies piled up and the floor was covered in fresh blood. There were odd scriptures drawn on the walls; presumably with the blood that stained the floor as well. Issei might have been fine while being in this scene; he was after all someone who caused a lot of death by being a ninja in his home universe. However, normal people might go through a mental breakdown from witnessing such a sight.

Issei looked around the room to see why he had been summoned. He wanted to see what this contracted entailed and if he had been summoned to take a sacrifice or something like that, he would just kill the person summoning him. He might have become a half devil, but certain lines should not be crossed when dealing with Issei.

As Issei searched the room for the person that summoned him, it didn't take long for him to find a priest sitting in a couching. The priest looked at him with disgust and said "Why if it isn't the shitty demon that infidel summoned! Nice to fucking meet you, shitty demon~"

Issei was confused by the eccentric priest's apparent bipolar condition. He looked at the priest like he was an idiot and said "If you didn't summon me, what am I supposed to do?"

The priest started to laugh with mania, he said "What should you do? Shitty demons should just die!"

The priest took out a gun and a holy lightsaber. He tried to slash at Issei, but his attack was effortlessly dodged. Issei was still trying to figure out what the second item in the priest's hands where; he found out the hard way. The priest pulled the trigger and a gold plated bullet hit Issei in his legs.

It was a pitifully ineffective wound after Issei used his holy water healing to heal his leg back into perfect condition in a couple moments. His action stunned the priest into saying "What! A shitty demon that can use holy light?"

After he said this a clumsy nun came into the room and ran in between Issei and the priest she said "Father Freed! Don't hurt Issei! Please..."

Freed was once again surprised, he said "Newbie, you know this demon scum?"

Asia said "This is my friend! He's not a demon, just the other day I saw him use holy water to heal me after I fell."

Freed didn't like being made a fool, he shoved Asia away and said "Heretic bitch! Clearly he's a demon! He came from a magic circle to a devil's summon!"

Asia wasn't anything to Issei, but he felt uncomfortable watching this "priest" shove and kick Asia as if she was trash. Just as he was about to act, a familiar group of devils came out of another teleportation portal. Rias' entire peerage team came out before Issei and Rias said "Sorry for not coming to your help sooner. There was a barrier preventing us from detecting the presence of these hostiles."

"I didn't really need the help… but I guess it show's you're sincere."

Rias didn't say anything else and took Issei's hand, she then activated the teleportation seal before Issei could react. Issei tried to get out of the teleportation seal, but after it was activated and his lower body vanished to the destination, he couldn't stop the process; unless he wanted to die.

Issei was a bit annoyed that Rias teleported him away before he could kill of that priest and help Asia, but he wasn't too worried. After the teleportation seal completed it process and Issei was free, he used his map function to teleport with his own teleportation back to the scene of contract.

To his dismay he found that Freed and Asia were long gone. Now Issei was at a loss; he didn't expect them to run away so quickly. He couldn't rely on his Origin detection, as that skill relied on his teleportation sensing range, which at this point barely covered a couple hundred meters. He teleported back to the Occult Research Club with fury on his face.