DXD SI : Chapter 53 : Fucking FINALLY~! (Patreon)

Disclaimer - I don't own any of the characters appearing in High School DXD or the Anime or the manga whatsoever.

Underworld

–Magdaran Bael–

After they left, he did not immediately leave the Underworld in search of where to go, like he wanted to. Instead, he chose to wait there, just outside the Ward boundary of his Garden, waiting for Zekram to eventually come here and confront him or something.

That….never happened. And he had an inkling as to why. After confirming that he was considering their proposal, the two Satans, instead of teleporting away, had flown deeper into the Main Compound, likely to talk to Zekram.

He’d felt one or two flares of power, one from Zekram and one that felt like Falbium, and after that, nothing. It had been over 15 minutes since the last flare up of power, and he saw no sign of Zekram himself or the man sending in someone to summon him, which was not going to work either way, but he expected the man to try simply because of the Satans somehow intruding on his territory.

Of course, all this will be followed with some kind of retaliation in the political spectrum, since that was the type of battlefield that Zekram seemed to like the most. Since he had not seen the expected response, then he could only expect that Zekram agreed with the Satans, and that sentence was not something he expected to enter his mind anytime soon.

That raised a pretty important question for him.

Just what in the Hell had happened for them to do this?

Bending over themselves for him, allowing him to essentially become a free agent with virtually no expectations or burdens whatsoever, an ideal condition that he had never expected to attain so soon, if at all. He had half expected having to fight some people, make a big statement, and then fend off attacks for years on end, whenever he left the Underworld, to finally gain some semblance of peace after decades of not coming back.

To have all that just dropped in his lap one random afternoon was understandably eyebrow raising.

He planned to take full advantage of this opportunity. Serafall even guaranteed lossless teleportation for him, and he was kinda curious how they planned on following through, but if they were to be believed, then he had to start preparing now, not the Garden itself.

That could wait. He had to prepare the location. 

Just to be on the safe side, though, he remained inside the Garden for an hour more and only left after not seeing any signs of Zekram doing anything fishy, straight to the one place that had the highest number of opportunities. 

He could finally leave the Underworld. The Satans did not know or did not care that once he left with his Garden, the entire Underworld had nothing on him, nothing they could use as leverage, and nothing they could threaten him into compliance. 

He would miss the Pit, and the training he had devised for himself by exploiting something that obviously God or Lucifer had left behind. It was a fun way to measure his growth, as it was very easy to check just how far he could enter that Holy Pit and even if he did, just how long he could remain inside using his Cloak, and even beyond that, there was the aspect of continuously damaging himself and then healing up to gain some resistance to the most dangerous weakness of Devil kind.

Eh, he could always smuggle himself back into the Underworld if he wanted to enter the Pits that bad, but the opportunity to officially get his Garden out of the Underworld only arose once, which is why he left immediately for the Oppai Club.

Hopefully, Odin should be around for a deal. The God clearly wanted something from him and had treated him well so far, so he might as well approach Odin to get his Garden secured. Plus, they had a Goddess of Fertility who had already given him a blessed item. Maybe she was interested in working with him? He certainly was, to study the effect of a Divine entity on his Garden.

Even if his Garden was mostly demonic in nature, her Godhood should help somewhat, and even if it didn’t, he had more than enough Demonic Soil stored away to make sure the Mother Tree survived and even thrived, not to mention all the things he could do if he stopped holding back using his conceptual powers on the Trees.

Oh, he couldn’t wait to get out! The excitement must have been clear on his face because the moment he entered the Oppai Club, he felt a heavy gaze on him. One that only increased in intensity as he sat down in his usual booth. 

He had an idea as to whose gaze it was, so he didn’t bother resisting when he felt a familiar pull, not that he could resist aside from blowing the spatial magic up, which might just create a chain reaction all around him since this entire space seemed to be one big work of art when it came to spatial magic and Norse Runes. Obviously, since it was made by Odin personally.

This branch atleast. He was sure that the other branches were manned by normal supernatural people, and had much less exoticness, both in terms of the Patrons as well as in terms of the food and alcohol on offer.

His vision flashed white for a moment before he looked at Odin, who was looking at him, while reclining in his chair, a Cigar Pipe in his hand, and a monocle on his eye, which was hilarious since his other eyes was covered in an eye patch and he was pretty sure that Gods did not need corrective lenses.

….Maybe the joke itself was not that funny, but just because he was in a good mood, he found stuff funny? He found himself questioning.

“So, brat,” Odin said, dispelling the Cigar and the Monocle, “What put you in such a good mood? Normally, you carry around your own cloud of negative feelings. If the booths were not such great isolators, any Sage in training here would have knocked themselves out trying to make sense of your psyche.”

What? Really?

He gave the man a look conveying his questions, and the man just returned it with a look telling him that he was stupid.

Well, he knew he was mentally not all there and not willing to dwell on such a trivial thing. Not when he finally had the opportunity to move his garden, he blurted out, “I need your help with something.”

“Go on.”

A year ago, hell, a month ago, he never would have expected to say these words to anyone, let alone a God King, and with any modicum of trust, let alone the reasonable amount of trust he had in Odin about handling of his garden, not because of any altruism on Odin’s part but simply because he could trust the God to act in his interests.

And judging by Odin’s behaviour, he was certainly trying to get into his good graces.

“I need your help transferring my Garden from the Underworld to a secure location. I’ll pay you! For this, as well as the Crown. Thank you for that, by the way.” He quickly added, just in case there were other technicalities.

Nothing was more important than getting his Garden secured. Not only would it just free up so much of his mental bandwidth, but it would also free him from keeping most of his powers under wraps. He genuinely believed that had he not been restrained from using his conceptual powers freely, he would have been atleast twice as strong as he was now. Not Super Devil territory yet, but more than enough of a match for the non Super Devil Satans in the Underworld, even with the lack of combat experience.

Odin did not react at all to his offer, “...And how do you plan to do that? I sure hope you don’t think that I will go there myself to secure your transport. Because, brat, I might like you and think you are obviously going to become someone important in the future, but I am not stupid enough to do that.”

He waved the man off, “No. No, you don’t have to do any of that. I have an arrangement with the Satans, as well as my House. I only need a secured location. The Satans are going to arrange lossless teleportation for the Garden.”

“And why are they doing that?”

“Who knows?” he found himself in one of the rare happy moods. In fact, he didn’t think he had ever been this happy before, so he was more than happy to give out information freely. “They just need me out of the Underworld for some reason and were willing to do anything to ensure that. Yeah, I found it weird  too, but then again, I got one of the most important things out of it so I don’t much care.”

“....You don’t think they could be sabotaging you?”

He gave the man a look, trying to think of why they would do something like that before replying, “I don’t think they want to do that. Also, what benefit would that bring? If they wanted to attack me, they had multiple opportunities before, where I would not have been able to retaliate in any meaningful capacity. Also, the Garden is full of just normal trees in the Underworld. It isn’t anything special. Plus, I think they want my cooperation for some reason, and were just looking for ways to get that.”

“Plus, if I chicken out now and don’t even try getting it out, then what use is all this power? I would forever be chained to that one place, regardless of what heights I might reach one day, with my power.” He finished in one breath, and he was sure that it was some kind of record of him speaking continuously for that long.

Hell, it was usually the other way around. The other party spoke for longer while he gave out one sentence replies or questions. It was…nice.

“I see.” Odin replied before asking one more time, “And I only have to secure a landing site? And then a place for your Garden?”

“Yes! As I said before, I will pay for it. Plus, if you could arrange a meeting with Freyr, that would be best.”

Odin rolled his singular eye at him. “Brat, you are centuries behind having enough money to pay me.”

“I wasn’t talking about money,” he said and raised his hand, covered in his Power of Destruction, before bringing it down on his other hand, disintegrating flesh, right up until the bone.

He found it worthwhile to reveal one of his trump cards for this. That’s how important it was for him to get his Garden out of the Underworld.

Odin remained silent, even as he stopped the bleeding, and then Odin’s one eye widened as his power surged around his arm, rapidly healing it within seconds, leaving behind a healthy hand.

He flinched minutely as Odin’s hand lashed out to tug at his healed hand, his fingers lighting up with some sort of diagnostic magic as he analysed the healed hand.

“And you can heal anyone?”

He shrugged, “Wouldn’t know. I haven’t tried it on anything but myself, my trees and a few  Demonic Beasts I killed shortly after. No idea of the long term effects either, but I  turned out just fine, and I have used the power every day for years now.”

Damn, did it feel good to finally brag about his powers. After all, they were awesome.

I am awesome.

A/N - If the tone of the chapter feels odd compared to before, it is intended that way. Mag is just overflowing with too many happy hormones right now, and kinda foregoing his usual paranoid mind.