DXD SI : Chapter 75 : Wards, Rituals & Anticlimactic Death. (Patreon)

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

Romania, Earth

–Magdaran Bael–

As he flew to the castle in the distance, he realised two things. One, that the entire thing was a blind spot to his senses, which meant that it had high quality wards that suppressed all the energy signatures from the inside, and two, there were no guards around the castle.

He could still sense the two small squads headed to the location he had popped into, but aside from them, he could sense nothing on these lands.

Not around the castle, and not even when he pushed his sensing range to cover a large radius. It was only when he pushed himself to the max that he sensed a couple of vampire signatures, but none of them were worth anything. In fact, he could categorise all of them as lower than even a Low Class Devil, with barely any power. 

They were probably the peasant and worker class of the Vampires here. This was the Tepes faction, as Odin had informed him, and they were the strongest faction of the current Vampire species, but not by a huge margin. If a fight did break out between the Tepes faction and the Carmilla Faction, then there would be no winner, as both of them were roughly on the same level when it came to strength and people count. It was only the leaders of the respective factions that had a slight difference in power.

He wouldn’t even call it a difference in power. It was more akin to a difference in skill and its combat applications. Carmilla was more akin to a magical powerhouse compared to King Tepes, who held dominion over the most important thing in every Vampire’s life.

Blood.

Shaking his head, he dismissed the absurd thought of Zekram somehow finding a way to make two of the most warring factions come together to fight him, and took a good look at the castle below. It was still mostly cloaked from his senses, so he did the most reasonable thing he could do when he was on a time crunch and raring to hunt down a guy.

He poked the wards with his power. Well, the poke did come with an injection of his power into the wards, the entire structure unravelling under his power within a moment as he applied pressure all around the pathways of the ward, right up until that sliver of power reached the wardstone and broke it, shattering the wards right in front of him.

The moment that happened, his eyes widened as he ducked to the side, a spear brimming with Holy Energy surging past him, right up until it exploded in the sky. The action had been instinctive, and he could tell that the Holy Energy was high tier, even above the Holy Water he experienced before this, but still nowhere near enough to actually injure or kill him.

Which is why he knew to dodge as a three pronged spear of blood stabbed where his head previously was. He moved back as the spear stretched, changed shapes, and became multiple swords as he was attacked repeatedly.

Knowing that this was King Tepes, he blasted apart the blood constructs, making sure that not even a single drop of blood landed on him, before flying towards the castle, his skin covered in a thin cloak of his own power, just in case they had some esoteric blood curse that could get past his usual defenses.

He had grown a lot over the past five years, especially when it came to defending against esoteric uses of magic, like curses, life magic, divination, and more. Part of it was because it was just plain easier to use his power to blast everything away, and the other part of it was just knowledge. Knowing more about the curse’s nature allowed him to easily get rid of it.

He had all the tools built within his body and just needed the right knowledge to defend himself. That knowledge came from Odin and the vast library the man had, access to which was freely given to him as part of the deal he had with the Norse when it came to selling his goods and for them to become the patsy, just in case someone went through all the trouble to look for him, even after knowing that the Norse were involved in some capacity.

As he passed a layer of shadow wards that were probably erected on the spot after the castle wards were shattered, he smiled as his Descruto Cloak, as he liked to call it in the privacy of his mind, pinged him about the dozens of curses that were intercepted before they could actually latch onto him, weak as they might be.

The second he passed the shadow layer, though, things became clear to him as he aborted his flight immediately, instead summoning a giant shield in front of him, on top of a sphere of his Destruction power all around him, just as an instinctive response to what he just saw.

Thousands of vampires, some shackled, some floating, some bleeding, some glowing with lines that showed their innards, all of them interlinked to each other using some sort of massive ritual.

The giant shield in front of him was hit with an attack borne by the Power of Destruction. Thankfully, it held, as he had refined that particular shield construct hundreds of times during his battle with Thor, Vali, and in a particularly rare scenario, with Odin as well. 

The attack dissipated as well as his Shield, as he finally took a look at the maddened face of Zekram Bael, crisscrossing veins of purple all over his face and body, as he floated in between two Vampires floating by his side, who were in turn connected to all the other vampires, feeding energy directly to Zekram, who raised his hand as a small spear of the Power of Destruction began manifesting.

It should have been no concern to him at all, as Zekram was below him in terms of raw power and that alone should have rendered most of Zekram’s personal threat to negligible levels, provided he did not resort to something truly asinine as eating one of Infinity’s Snakes, but this was different.

His eyes narrowed, taking in the entire ritual circle all around him, floating up a bit to see what exactly was happening, aside from the obvious function of empowering Zekram at the cost of all the vampires below.

He raised his hand, casting multiple shields to ward off Zekram’s attacks, as he was undoubtedly trying to buy time to finish making that spear of his, while he was doing the same, trying to understand how to resolve this situation.

Sure, blasting the entire area with his power was an option, but if there was one thing Thor had taught him, or rather beaten into him over the course of the past few years, it was that just raw power was never going to be the answer to everything. 

What if all of this was just a ploy for him to expend his power and leave him weakened? If he somehow found himself an unwitting participant in one of the Forbidden rituals or triggering such a ritual using his open salvo, then there might be heavy penalties that he might not be able to get out of, not without paying some sort of cost.

And knowing Zekram, the cost was not going to be small.

“Magdaran!” In the middle of this, he looked up as Zekram bellowed, aiming the Spear at him, that manic grin still on his face. That’s when it hit him. The sense of wrongness.

Zekram was…wrong. He looked wrong, he felt wrong, his power felt wrong, the whole situation felt wrong. Zekram was not the type to let power get to his head, at least not in such a visible manner.

He was also not the type to directly engage in combat, not when the chances of victory were not one hundred percent. No, he should be hiding behind some of his more clever ploys, cash in favours that he must have accrued over his centuries of life, and then, when all else was gone, and there truly was no other option, do something that would either make the attacker stop or make them regret attacking Zekram in some other way.

That was how Zekram played the game of his life. He always had to be the one to come out on top, even if one day he had to lose his life.

He was given no more time to think about the wrongness of the citation as Zekram hurled the spear at him, chock full of the Power of Destruction. The spear arrived in front of him instantly, having erased the concept of friction and distance even?

He instantly blasted back, his eyes wide in alarm as Zekram somehow did the same thing that took him months of dedicated practice to pull off.

Sure, manipulating space was nothing new, especially not for Devils of their power levels, but to do so with an attack, an energy attack no less, and to do so in an accurate enough manner should have required either Sirzechs’ level of power, or his own unique mutated Power of Destruction.

Zekram had neither, but he did have time. Lots of it. More than Sirzechs and he had combined. So maybe it was possible he used that time to gain this mastery? But then, where was this mastery all these–

He snapped himself out of these thoughts, the urge to stop everything here and dissect and analyze every little interesting phenomenon happening here was overwhelming, but he focused on the main event at hand.

The spear.

The spear was apparently armed with homing magic, because of course it was.

Regular blasts of his power did not work on the spear, as it pierced through all of that. Zekram was also actively channeling power into the spear as he flew through the air, his eyes tracking the glow of energy from the ritual, the spear hot on his tail.

Every time he tried to take potshots at the ritual below, he felt the energy flow from Zekram swell in response, as the spear erased the distance and came very close to stabbing him in the face.

It was all so…fascinating.

Yes, fascinating. That was the word he would use for this situation.

He felt no real danger from this, not when he regularly faced down a Living Storm barely compressed into the form of a Giant, but even so, the lessons from the same Giant came to the forefront of his mind as he made a decision, lamenting the fact that he would not get to research more about this very interesting ritual, not to mention just how Zekram managed to subdue and convince the two factions leaders and likely the cream of the crop of the current Vampire race, to participate in a ritual that was more than likely sacrificial in nature.

Shaking his head, his cloak came out in full force, the full cloud of Power of Destruction lashing out at everything around him, as the spear was grabbed by one such tendril of his power, before the spear was crushed into nothingness, not by raw power but by his power reading the concepts of the spear before cutting out Zekram’s connection to it.

It was evident by the backlash on Zekram’s face, as he just pulled more from the thousands of vampires below them, the ritual circle and the lines around them brightening in response to the power flowing through them.

This time, Zekram raised both his hands before clapping them together, only to pull the palms slightly to reveal a dense ball of Power of Destruction that only continued to grow bigger. A Destruction Rasengan, if you will.

Fortunately, that was more than enough time for him to go through the ritual sigils to realise that this particular ritual did not have any hidden feature for him to worry about. It was a complicated ritual, barely holding onto the power coursing through the entire thing, which is why it would have been all but impossible to add another function to it.

Done with the farce, and completely unwilling to listen to a single more thing from Zekram, lest he managed to weasel his way out again, his Cloak reared back like a Cobra before it expanded, beyond his body, beyond the constant smaller attacks from Zekram, beyond the ritual that glitched immediately the moment his power began destroying the smaller vampires, and only continued to expand in size.

An omnidirectional wave of his Power of Destruction, supercharged to just destroy everything it came into contact with, just erased the castle and a large portion of the castle grounds as well.

A tendril of his power lashed out and wrapped around Zekram’s midsection, as the Original Pillar Devil, a person holding the highest tier of honor when it came to the Underworld and its politics, was left thrashing around in his grip, slowly being dragged back into the ball of Destruction he had manifested all around him.

His power told him just how fucked Zekram was and how it was mostly self inflicted. His internals were basically fried, and without a miracle, there was no way Zekram was going to survive. It was not just his physical body; his soul was also damaged, likely because of the backlash from the ritual being ended so abruptly.

He did not really act to save the Faction leaders, simply because it would have taken a bit more effort on his part, something he did not want to do, not when it just raised the possibility of Zekram somehow fleeing the scene once more, though now, looking at Zekram, he wondered just how much of the original Zekram was even left inside the body now.

Either way, he just watched with dispassionate eyes as Zekram’s screaming and thrashing form was dragged into his power, until finally, the Devil was utterly gone.

Still, he kept his guard up as well as the ball of Destruction around for a few more minutes after that, just in case Zekram had something else planned, but when nothing happened, he let his power dissipate and looked at the now ruined grounds of the Tepes Clan.

Or what was the grave of the current Vampire race.

There was quite literally zero chance that any supernatural faction in the world would ignore this. 

Oh, they would certainly wait to see if Dracula himself would wake up or not, but if the Big Vampire himself did not wake up to deter others, it was very likely that only Dracula would be left as a Vampire over the course of the next few years.

Knowing that the Vampires were really not worth that concern, he looked at the hole in the ground and sighed, feeling not really satisfied with how he had killed Zekram.

For one, he still felt that it was not the real Zekram, even though all his powers told him the same. The soul was the same, the power was the same, the aura was the same, and yet the thinking, the expressions, the lack of planning, all of it pointed towards something else.

Still, to confirm, he called up his resident Man in the Chair, Odin.

“Yes, he is dead. I just checked. Now, get out of there before something else happens.” Were the first words that Odin said to him before hanging up.

He smiled, taking a moment to survey the aftermath of his work, basked in the feeling of slight happiness that came with the knowledge that he had fulfilled the two goals that his childish self had made up for himself in that deep, dark basement he had carved out for himself, right under the Garden, and sighed.

Finally, he was done.

Word Count - 2683