POV: Haruki Yamashiro
Demonic power was fascinating. It was so open to interpretation while remaining bound by a web of softer limitations. At its core, demonic energy was the devil equivalent of mana or chakra, an inherently chaotic and formless force that could be shaped into whatever effect its wielder was capable of conceiving.
An entire race had been born with the potential to impose imagination upon reality, which was an astonishing thing once one stopped treating it as ordinary. Imagination was among the defining faculties of sentient life, the capacity to conceive of what did not yet exist and then act toward bringing it into being. Every devil was born with demonic energy, and because they were creatures of magic, its use appeared almost as natural to them as moving a limb or drawing breath.
Of course, anything described in terms that broad could never be simple in practice. According to Akeno, resident sadomasochistic priestess and my current tutor, effective use of demonic power rested upon three pillars: control, willpower, and creativity. The first concerned the mind itself. Sentient thought rarely proceeds along a single orderly line; consciousness wanders through impressions, memories, associations, sensations and stray images quickly, much of it occurring beyond our control.
To use demonic energy properly, a devil had to discipline that mental turbulence until the desired effect could be held with absolute clarity, excluding every irrelevant thought that might distort the result. Willpower was the second pillar - demonic energy had an intrinsically chaotic character and resisted definitive form. The wielder had to impose intention upon that entropy strongly enough to make the energy obey, which sounded straightforward until one actually attempted to command something whose natural state was disorder.
The third pillar was creativity, after all even perfect control and immense will meant little if the user could not properly conceive the effect they wished to produce. Possessing the theoretical ability to impose almost any idea upon reality therefore said very little about whether one could actually do it. Everyone possessed muscles too, but that did not make everyone an athlete. Demonic power worked by a similar principle, except the muscle in question happened to be imagination itself. Even so, Akeno's explanation left enough apparent loopholes that I had already produced several theories for abusing the system before my cruel tutor began shooting them down one by one.
First, Akeno said I needed control. I had to become conscious of the demonic energy within me, distinguish its movement from the ordinary sensations of my new body, and draw it outward without allowing the slightest fluctuation of thought to disturb its shape. Control governed everything. Without it, possessing enormous reserves of demonic energy simply meant having considerably greater power with which to injure yourself.
Devils naturally had an entire pedagogical system for teaching this. They had practiced demonic magic for thousands of years, and any civilization that old eventually developed terminology for every stage of doing something properly. The first technique Akeno taught me was called [Crimson Surge], which sounded unnecessarily dramatic until I remembered that I was dealing with devils and adjusted my expectations accordingly.
Functionally, [Crimson Surge] was a controlled flood of demonic energy through the body, enhancing physical strength, durability, and magical output. Devils also used it to display their power, since releasing enough energy made one's presence perceptible to everyone nearby. In combat it served as both enhancement and declaration, the supernatural equivalent of making it very clear that negotiations had ended.
I mastered it quickly, considerably faster than Akeno expected judging by the gradual evolution of her expression from teasing amusement to genuine interest and eventually quiet disbelief. I had an unfair advantage, one acquired under peculiar circumstances.
Being reincarnated from birth with an adult consciousness had been unbelievably boring. Infancy left me trapped inside a body capable of almost nothing while possessing a mind accustomed to constant stimulation, and I suspect I would have gone half-mad if I had not learned to occupy myself internally. Meditation came first. I studied Zen practices and gradually learned to quiet the ceaseless movement of thought until I could hold my mind empty for extended periods. Then I improved my visualization because memory was the only entertainment permanently available to me. I learned to descend into recollection, drawing upon impressions stored beyond immediate conscious recall, reconstructing books, conversations, music, and eventually entire films inside my head.
Then of course for all of it to work, one needed an inhumane level of concentration and so it became another obsession. I practiced fixing my attention upon a single object or thought until everything beyond it receded from awareness. Later came lucid dreaming, mnemonic techniques, and an elaborate memory palace that grew so extensive my sister would probably have diagnosed the entire enterprise as further evidence that I desperately needed friends. All of that mental discipline translated almost perfectly into controlling demonic energy.
The essential trick behind Crimson Surge was stability. Demonic energy felt strangely natural inside me, almost like becoming aware of water after spending one's entire existence as a fish. Once I could perceive it, directing it became a problem of concentration, and concentration happened to be something I had spent most of my second life cultivating. Akeno's expression went from smug amusement to mild concern within two hours. By the sixth hour, she had begun muttering to herself and contacting Rias.
By the end of the third day, they were calling me a prodigy. Flattering, certainly, but I had hardly rediscovered fire. I had the rather unusual advantage of having been conscious since infancy and having spent those otherwise intolerable years disciplining my own mind because the alternative was slowly going insane from boredom.
Akeno also informed me that my natural reserves were unusually large for a reincarnated devil, somewhere around Mid-Class by her estimation. I permitted myself approximately 0.03 seconds of pride before she smugly informed me that her reserves had been greater when she began training. Typical. She then admitted, with considerably less enthusiasm, that my innate control surpassed hers at the same stage. I allowed myself to enjoy that victory. After Crimson Surge came a collection of techniques whose names suggested that devil magical terminology had been established during an unusually theatrical period of their history.
[Wrathlash] involved concentrating demonic energy within a specific part of the body, directing it into the eyes to sharpen perception, the arms and hands to increase striking power, or the legs to produce bursts of extraordinary speed. It demanded considerably greater precision than Crimson Surge because the energy was compressed into a smaller area, and losing control while reinforcing your own body carried consequences I preferred not to investigate personally.
[Domain of Dread] extended demonic energy outward into the surrounding environment, creating something resembling an additional sensory field. Skilled users could perceive other sources of supernatural energy within it and, with sufficient refinement, distinguish their nature, strength, and even aspects of emotional state. The same underlying principles apparently supported barriers and wards, although the effective range depended heavily upon both output and total reserves.
[Anointing of Power] was the devil equivalent of enchantment. Demonic energy could be infused into physical objects, strengthening weapons and eventually producing considerably more elaborate effects. Familiars could apparently be enhanced through related methods. I tested the basic principle with a wooden stick and managed to cut through a tree with it, which was admittedly one of those moments when living inside an anime world became difficult to complain about.
[Oblivion Fang] was the opposite end of the spectrum. The technique concentrated an enormous quantity of demonic energy into a single point before releasing it at once, sacrificing efficiency and endurance for overwhelming destructive force. It was designed as a finishing attack and carried the obvious disadvantage of consuming enough energy to leave an inexperienced user dangerously depleted afterward. Powerful, impressive, and strategically reckless if employed without certainty that whatever you aimed it at would stay down.
Learning the techniques proved easier than refining them. Increasing my reserves required repeatedly exhausting and recovering them, while improving Crimson Surge meant maintaining it for longer periods without wasting energy. That was how I spent the next three days: practice, depletion, recovery, correction, repetition. I slept little and ate only when necessary. Akeno eventually became concerned, while Rias made several attempts to persuade me to rest. Their concern was appreciated, but my new body required far less sleep than my human one, and once something genuinely interested me I had always found stopping considerably harder than continuing.
Three days were enough for me to internalize the fundamentals and begin refining them independently. Watching Akeno during that period became its own measure of my progress. Her initial amusement gave way to surprise, then sustained scrutiny, and finally the weary acceptance of a teacher who had discovered that her student intended to interrogate every principle until either he understood it or she developed a headache.
Rias eventually came running when Akeno summoned her and watched me manipulate demonic energy firsthand. Her expression shifted between astonishment and an intensity I could not immediately place. She called me a genius trembling with excitement, while Akeno stood beside her and agreed. I was not but I saw little reason to correct either of them.
What interested me considerably more was the way Rias looked at me afterward. There was calculation beneath the excitement, the unmistakable expression of someone who had unexpectedly discovered a possible solution to an existing problem. I possessed only fragments of the relevant plot, but something stirred in my memory about Issei interrupting a marriage, a duel, or perhaps both. Why he had done so, against whom, and when it was supposed to happen remained completely beyond me.
POV: Akeno
Haruki held a simple wooden stick, casually using it to slice through a tree as though it were a blade. Demonic energy flowed along its length in a thin, so cleanly controlled that Akeno would have assumed its wielder had practiced Anointing for months rather than three days.
Akeno sighed softly.
Rias's luck was one of the great mysteries of her life. If one were to look for the outside, her peerage could almost persuade an ignorant person that Rias was some manner of Machiavellian genius, carefully finding gifted souls at their most vulnerable and arranging their salvation at precisely the proper moment. Certain Underworld tabloids had even proposed exactly that theory, and their nonsense had just enough circumstantial evidence to be entertaining.
One needed only to examine the sheer talent concentrated within Rias's peerage. Some claimed Rias secretly engineered misfortunes so she could descend afterward as the benevolent savior. Others preferred the grander theory that Sirzechs-sama orchestrated events from Lucifaad, quietly bending circumstances toward his beloved sister's advantage.
Akeno knew both theories were nonsense, but she found them delightful nonsense. She had been Rias's first piece and closest friend for nearly eight years, long enough to say with almost complete certainty that neither Rias nor her august brother would ever manufacture another person's suffering for personal gain. Rias was far too kind for such things, and whatever other virtues Akeno might lovingly attribute to her Buchou, nobody acquainted with her could accuse her of possessing Machiavelli's appetite for manipulation.
Rias could be terribly naive, occasionally lazy, and remarkably talented at postponing unpleasant matters until they became impossible to postpone. But she had a sincere heart and regarded her peerage as family in a society where plenty of Kings still thought of reincarnated devils primarily as slaves. Her greatest weakness was perhaps her idealism. Her greatest weakness was perhaps the idealism accompanying that kindness. She procrastinated, disliked confronting unpleasant truths until circumstances demanded it, and possessed the dangerous habit of expecting other people to have consciences resembling her own.
That was partly why Akeno had volunteered to train Haruki herself. Someone had to watch over her Buchou's newest Bishop, and every instinct she kept whispering that Haruki Yamashiro needed to watched.
He was… unusual.
Polished and remarkably erudite, certainly, with an alert gaze that seldom rested and a range of interests bordering upon the indiscriminate. Football one moment, philosophy the next, followed by classical literature, history, painting, or magical theory, and he approached each with the same peculiar joie de vivre. There was something almost captivating in the intensity of it.
She had discovered that during their first lesson. Akeno had explained the elementary principles of manipulating demonic energy and warned him that concentration was the greatest obstacle for beginners. Haruki had simply closed his eyes, and the change had been immediate. His breathing slowed, his muscles relaxed, and within moments his mind seemed to have settled into a stillness Akeno associated with practitioners who had spent years cultivating meditation.
Curiosity had encouraged her to test him.
She had begun with harmless distractions, moving closer than propriety strictly required and speaking softly beside his ear. Nothing happened. Akeno, mildly offended and considerably more amused, allowed the sadistic streak she usually kept politely leashed to emerge and traced a fingernail lightly along the side of his neck.
Haruki did not so much as twitch.
That was when amusement became genuine curiosity. Demonic power demanded focus because imagination supplied it with form, and beginners wasted enormous effort fighting the ordinary disorder of their own thoughts. A wandering image, an unexpected sensation, a momentary lapse in concentration could destabilize the intended effect. Akeno had trained talented devils before and knew exactly how difficult that first hurdle could be. She had never encountered concentration quite like Haruki's. Once he fixed his attention upon something, the rest of the world appeared to lose its claim upon him.
So Akeno stepped aside and decided to see what he would do.
The answer, apparently, was everything. Haruki became an obsessive student of the art, completing exercises before she had finished preparing the next lesson and reducing techniques to their underlying principles with disconcerting speed. "I only need to identify the fundamentals and recombine them toward different results," he had told her, with the tone of someone explaining that water flowed downhill. Akeno had stared at him for several seconds after that.
She found his genius fascinating. He had now been training for three days with scarcely any rest and no proper sleep. Even Rias had tried repeatedly to convince him to stop, only to receive some polite variation of later before he returned to whatever experiment currently occupied him. Devils needed less rest than humans, certainly, but fatigue still existed, and Haruki was simply too enchanted by magic to care. Akeno watched another section of wood fall cleanly from the tree and concealed a smile behind her hand.
His enthusiasm was, frankly, rather adorable.
"So how does the whole supernatural world actually work?"
"What do you mean?" Akeno asked.
"Just that if all the myths are real, why hasn't the world fallen into chaos? Why don't humans know about us? Why aren't we enslaved or worse?"
Rias really had struck gold with this boy, Akeno thought. Visualization and concentration were the foundation of demonic magic, and Haruki had an unnatural aptitude for both. He spoke while maintaining Crimson Surge without the slightest fluctuation, dividing his attention between conversation and magic after only three days of instruction.
"Well, there was a great deal of chaos in the past," she began softly. "Especially before the birth of Christ, during what we generally call the Age of Magic. Gods, dragons, devils, spirits, monsters and countless other beings moved freely between the material and spiritual worlds. Humanity and the lesser races suffered terribly whenever they attracted the attention of beings restrained by neither law nor conscience. Eventually, several of the more benevolent gods decided they could tolerate it no longer. Chief among them was the God of the Covenant."
"You mean the God of Abraham?"
"The very same," she confirmed pleasantly. "And since you are newly reincarnated, I should probably warn you against praying directly to Him if you happen to be religious. He's rather unfriendly to our constitution, and you'll earn yourself a dreadful migraine. In any case, several of the great pantheons eventually cooperated in bringing about the Flood. You know the biblical account of Noah, of course. The Bible preserves one tradition of it, every other culture has their own myths of the same flood. Afterward, the gods established laws restricting supernatural interference with the material world."
"A devil praying causes pain?" Haruki considered that for a moment. "So one of the medieval superstitions was true. What about invoking His name? Does that also cause pain?"
"Simply saying God will do nothing," Akeno explained. "It's a general title and could refer to any number of deities. One of His personal names or sacred titles, however, such as Elohim…"
Pain immediately stabbed through Akeno's skull, sharp enough to make her smile tighten, while Haruki merely touched his forehead with evident curiosity.
"…will produce something like that," she finished with considerably less enthusiasm. "Scripture can be troublesome as well. Reading passages of the bible aloud or invoking them with genuine faith is dangerous to devils, which is one reason exorcists are so fond of doing it."
"Interesting," Haruki observed. "But returning to my question, why would the malevolent entities simply obey the rules after the Flood? That seems unlikely."
"They didn't, at least initially," Akeno said, amusement returning to her voice. "Several gods began actively policing the material world, particularly the God of the Bible and Shiva, whose strength made open defiance exceptionally dangerous. Hostile gods and other supernatural beings gradually withdrew, concealed themselves, or learned to influence humanity indirectly. It worked imperfectly, of course, which led the gods to seek something permanent. Eventually the Christian God proposed a rather extraordinary ritual. Would you care to guess what it was?"
Haruki considered the question before nodding slowly. "Jesus Christ."
Another flash of pain struck her, considerably stronger this time.
"Precisely. God would take human form, live among mankind without sin, endure temptation and suffering, and finally sacrifice Himself willingly. The completed ritual altered the relationship between the material and spiritual worlds, separating them and greatly restricting supernatural access to the human realm. The boundaries that govern our interference today ultimately descend from that event."
Haruki frowned. "I thought Christ's sacrifice was meant to redeem humanity's sins and reconcile mankind with God."
"Perhaps it accomplished both," Akeno replied with a graceful shrug. "Sometimes myths are layers, not contradictions."
He accepted that with a thoughtful nod. "But the Great War happened after Christ, correct?"
"Yes. Its ultimate cause is disputed even among people who participated in it. Some claim Lucifer regarded the sacrifice as an intolerable humiliation and launched the war in defiance, while others believe open conflict between Heaven and the fallen powers had already become inevitable. Whatever the cause, most of the Great War was fought within the spiritual world, so the material realm escaped the worst of it."
Haruki fell silent after that, returning to practicing. Akeno watched the energy move through him with irritating smoothness before another question, one she had been curious about since his reincarnation, finally escaped her.
"Why did you help Rias?" she asked. "You knew that creature could kill you, did you not?"
He looked at her as though the answer were obvious. "So just because it might inconvenience me, I should abandon someone in danger?"
For perhaps the first time that afternoon, Akeno did not know what to say. His words themselves were ordinary enough. The manner in which he delivered them was what caught her, calm and almost puzzled, as though risking his life for a stranger required less explanation than standing aside would have.
What an interesting specimen you are, Haruki-kun.
They had researched him, naturally. Normally, devils rarely bothered investigating ordinary humans in any great depth, but Haruki Yamashiro had attracted attention from both Rias and Sona before his reincarnation, Sona somewhat more so since he had once dated her Queen. His record had been almost suspiciously excellent. Academics, athletics, music, art, debate, every file seemed to contain another field in which he had distinguished himself. They thought he had some magical ancestry or a descendant of some ancient hero. Every theory eventually proved false. The Yamashiro family was thoroughly mundane, and Haruki's achievements appeared to be the product of talent refined through years of almost obsessive effort.
Their interest had consequently faded. Evil Pieces were precious, and few devils would spend one upon an ordinary human when Sacred Gear wielders, descendants of heroes, and members of supernatural bloodlines offered far more obvious potential.
Akeno watched the demonic energy flowing around Haruki's body with effortless grace as though he were in some way native to its element.
Well, that had certainly been an error in judgment.
If Rias had possessed even slightly less absurd luck, devilkind might never have discovered what Haruki Yamashiro could become with demonic power in his hands.