"I see, this must be rather bothersome for you." Tenma said with a frown as Rias kept talking, whining really, about the rising numbers of Stray Devils that started to appear in Kuoh recently.
"Seeing my favorite bread get discontinued is bothersome, having mutated former devils come to a highly populated area is a little bit worse than that." Rias said with a groan.
She didn't like dealing with Stray Devils. She didn't like the fact that they even existed. She couldn't begin to understand why lord Ajuka would put a failsafe as cruel as Stray Devil mutation in Evil Pieces without even realizing and then just not try to find a method to fix it.
Sure, he had claimed that it had to do something with the unstable nature of the material they were made of but Rias had doubts. Cause if the problem was simply a case of them being unstable then any reincarnated devil could mutate instead of just Stray Devils.
She still remembered the first time she had seen a mutated monster that a Stray Devil became and she couldn't sleep soundly for a month, images of Akeno turning into such monstrosities haunting her nightmares.
Yet she also knew she had no way to help them, and she had seen how far their mental states could go in an ugly direction. Killing them was the only mercy she could offer.
"I have no idea why they are coming here. I know some Stray Devils can become sensitive to magic and move towards areas with high magical energies but that's not supposed to be common."
"You think that someone is directing them towards Kuoh?" Tenma asked as he took a sip from his cup. "Someone who might have something to gain by targeting you or your territory?"
"The only thing they would gain is my brother going John Wick on them, that isn't much of a reward." Rias huffed. She might not like to be seen only as the heiress of the house of Gremory or only as the little sister of Satan Lucifer but she was very much aware of how much protection she had due to those statuses, specifically the latter. "And I couldn't ask the Stray Devils considering..."
"Their deteriorating mental states?" Tenma said with a knowing smirk. "Yes, that is rather unfortunate. My apologies for not being able to offer more of an assistance."
"There is nothing you can do, unless you have a secret detective among your peerage?" Rias said jokingly but then blinked as Tenma started to look thoughtful as he gripped his chin. "Do you actually have a secret detective among your peerage?"
"Not... exactly." He said with a grimace. "It would be more accurate to say I have someone who can think like a monster and force answers out."
"You have a torturer?" Rias asked with an incredulous expression.
"He prefers to be called an artist but torture is a part of his art." Tenma said with a sigh. "But I would rather not bring him anywhere close to normal humans. He won't just go on a rampage but... there are more subtle ways he might want to have fun." He admitted, looking pained as he did so.
"I am starting to understand why you said you weren't bringing your whole peerage here." Rias said with a shaky smile. "Though you never told me how many members you had."
"Excluding me, there are currently ten people in my peerage. Though I still have two pawn pieces that I haven't used." Tenma admitted and Rias' eyes widened. She hadn't though that her new maybe-friend actually had an almost full peerage.
She only had four members.
"Can you tell me a bit about them, other than the artist." She asked with a smile, which Tenma replied in kind.
"Well, maybe not about all of them but I think there are a few members that you would end up being very good friends with." Tenma said with a laugh. "Especially one of my bishops, you can say that she understands the weight one's bloodline can place on them. Or maybe one of my rooks, he is kind of an hardass but he actually has a very soft heart. Though he would be very mad at me if he found out that I said that."
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"Damn incompetent crows." Diodora Astaroth, the scion of the house of Astaroth and a blood relative of the current Satan Beelzebub, muttered to himself as he bit his nail in frustration.
His deal with the fallen angels had been a simple one. He would be supplying them with information about a certain Sacred Gear holder for them to use their extraction device on and in exchange he would be given the corpse that would remain after the extraction.
It didn't matter how one looked at it, it was obvious that the deal favored the fallen far more than it favored him.
An Evil Piece might be able to revive the recently deceased, unless the damage to their body was far too extreme, but the fallen's plan was to extract the Sacred Gear. A human whose Sacred Gear was taken was not what one would call a good candidate for a peerage. Almost half of the reincarnated devils in the Underworld were recruited because they had Sacred Gears.
But Diodora cared little for it. The one he wanted, he didn't want because of power. He wanted her for the sake of ruining her.
He wanted Asia Argento simply to see her break!
He had deliberately injured himself and sneaked into Vatican, bribing several priests to look the other way, because he knew someone as kind as Asia would heal him without even thinking about the fact that he was a devil. Which would lead her to be excommunicated.
He already had pulled similar tricks to get other Holy Maidens excommunicated as witches. Only to give them hope by offering them a place in his peerage and then crush that hope by revealing my role in their oh so sad stories.
He had done it fifteen times already, and it had yet to stop feeling so good.
Yet someone was messing with his fun! Neither the fallen or Asia was where they were supposed to be! He should have known that trusting crows was foolish. Now he had to...
Why was the ground so close?
Before he could understand what was happening, Diodora's face met the ground and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get back up. It was as if an enormous force was pressing him down on earth.
"So this is the weird who wanted to kidnap that nun." A voice, a masculine one, came from above but Diodora couldn't raise his head to look at it's source.
"Indeed my friend. It is a good thing that our benevolent lord organized her travel to Italy without letting the information get to this little worm." Another voice, also masculine but unlike the one from before, this one was full of sadistic glee.
"Now then, Zora my good fellow, dispel the circles please. It would be so boorish to end this without letting the worm at least look at us." The voice said, and Diodora gritted his teeth as he focused on his magic. Preparing a spell to teach these fools what happened to those who messed with the house of Astaroth. But when the force vanished and he looked up...
All he saw was the moving shadows and a huge set of fangs descending on him.
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