We reappeared a distance away from a building that looked to have been built for pure function, looking like a cube of concrete with only a few windows for decoration. My magic sense was detecting tons of barriers around the building subtly displaying its importance.
"Look Cain, the sky is purple over there!" Lillian's shout drew my attention.
I knew from the DxD stories that the sky in the underworld was purple but reading about it and seeing it were two different things entirely. I looked towards the direction where Lillian was pointing and saw it.
The purple sky was stunning.
Although it was only a small section of the sky that was still purple, directly opposite where the sun had risen considering it was still early morning.
"That's right Lilly-chan," Serafall chimed in, "the underworld used to have purple sky during both day and night but Miracle Levia-tan✭ along with Juka-chan, Zechs-chan, and Falb-chan changed it."
"Misses Levia-tan, you're strong enough to change the sky?" Lillian looked over at Serafall in awe.
She puffed up her impressive chest, preening at the praise.
"That's right Lilly-chan, Levia-tan✭ is the strongest magical girl. You can become a super strong magical girl too Lilly-chan, just join me."
The first devilish action I see from her is trying to tempt someone, not onto the path of darkness, but onto the path of rainbows and sparkles.
"Stop it, don't corrupt her." I admonished already having started walking towards the building I presume was our destination.
"Mou," Serafall caught up with me and began swinging my arm back and forth, "magical girls are the opposite of corrupt you know, Kay-chan, the opposite!"
"Yeh, yeh."
"We use our super duper miracle power to fight corruption."
"What about magical girls that fall into corruption and turn evil though?" I said playing along.
Only to be almost pulled off my feet with my next step as Serafall abruptly stopped.
"WAHH!" She exclaimed, stars flashed in her eyes and sparkles appeared around her by magic as she pointed her wand at my face.
"You are such a super genius Kay-chan, even better than Juka-chan. He never used his mega brain to give me such fantastically amazing ideas."
"Who is even more genius than me Serafall." A calm voice interrupted from behind me.
Serafall dashed past me reaching the person who spoke, a man with green hair and wise blue eyes about a head taller than Serafall.
"Juka-chan Juka-chan, that's Kay-chan", she pointed at me, "and Lilly-chan", then at Lillian, "they're my new Magical Girl apprentices."
I gave her a blank stare for a second before turning to Ajuka Beelzebub.
"We're not."
"Mou, don't be like that Kay-chan, you can definitely be a magical girl after giving me such a great idea." Serafall pouted at me.
"I'm not even a girl though." I pointed out.
"You can be a magical boy then!" She exclaimed in a smug tone.
I just groaned.
"Just ignore her," Ajuka said.
"Hey!"
"I am Ajuka Beelzebub, its nice to meet you." He introduced himself, ignoring Serafall indignation.
"I'm Cain and that's Lillian."
I turned back a bit when introducing Lillian and was surprised to see that Serafall had snuck past me and was now complaining about being ignored by a confused Lillian, who didn't know whether to console her or ignore her as well.
"Whilst the fine control you have over your demonic power is very impressive, that method of detection can still be fooled by manipulator types like me by feeding you false information."
Ajuka's explanation clued me in on how Serafall had snuck past me.
He had cloaked her.
"I presume by manipulator type, you mean in terms of combat style?" I asked.
"That's right, we classify people by how they fight. Manipulators, like me, fight by taking control of magic; Serafall would be a controller type who uses her ice to change the battlefield to her advantage; while Sirzechs, is a destroyer who just overwhelms the battlefield with powerful attacks."
I nodded as this was a good way of classifying combatants in a world like this with such a vast variety of powers and techniques.
"This style of classification was adopted after the ancient age based on magic used by the ancient demons in which they would grant classifications to their troops that enhanced a specific style of combat. This was also what I passed my evil pieces on."
Ajuka's short history lesson was really interesting to me.
Since this world is a mix of multiple different stories from my previous life there must be lots of interesting interactions between aspects of the stories like this example of the Evil Pieces being inspired by the ancient demon magic 'Gyze'.
I wondered what other interesting links had formed across stories that made up the history of this world.
That also brought up an interesting question.
What does the top 10 list look like?
Especially considering the ancient races like the origin gods and ancient demons.
Misfit of Demon King Academy eventually goes multiversal in scale and Anos still looks overpowered, so if he was the same in this world he should rank higher than Great Red.
Deciding to spend some time in the future researching the links between stories, I turned my attention to Raphael.
'Can you stop the problem Ajuka just pointed out?'
[Currently, it is not possible to block beings of individual Ajuka Beelzebub's strength who specialize in energy manipulation.]
[Attempting to create a solution.]
"Serafall, I presume you had a purpose in coming with these two?" Ajuka's question drew my attention as I let Raphael do its work.
"Yes, let's go inside and talk." Serafall finally left Lillian who came up beside me as we started walking towards the building after Ajuka let us through the barriers.
-----
We were now, once again, sat inside a reception room with Lillian and me opposite another Maou while the first Maou sat of to the side between us.
"First of all Juka-chan, as I introduced before that's Kay-chan and Lilly-chan," Serafall still used our pet names, "and Kay-chan is our son."
".....what?" After a moment's silence, Ajuka turned to stare at Serafall with eyes wide and mouth hanging open, sheer surprise written across his face.
Seeing Ajuka's expression Serafall started laughing so hard she doubled over holding her stomach before slipping off her chair and onto the floor.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA." She laughed uproariously as she rolled around and smacked the floor.
"I haven't seen you look so surprised in forever Juka-chan ahahaha..."
Ajuka looked at Serafall before ordering her to explain in a no-nonsense voice.
She quickly stopped laughing and sat back in her chair, adopting the serious atmosphere of a leader.
"These two were the survivors of genetic experiments by Rizevim. They escaped and got to Kuoh before asking Cleria Belial to get in contact with me. Cain showed her ice produced via a mutated Sitri clan trait, like mine, to convince her."
Ajuka briefly glanced at us before shifting his gaze back to Serafall.
"Cain is a result of him trying to grow a super devil by combining the DNA of many clans, the primary base he used being DNA from you and me he must have collected during the Civil War."
He just nodded silently.
"What about the girl?"
"She was his attempt to create a successor for Big G, he used DNA primarily from Lilith, Gabriel, and Lucifer after he put it through some purification process."
He turned back towards us as a magic circle appeared in his hands. Before a wave of power crashed into my magic sense overloading it and the layer I had over Lillian to hide her aura.
[Warning, invasive magic attack detected.]
[Attempting resistance.]
[Resistance failed.]
[Attempting resistance.]
[Resistance failed.]
[Defensive countermeasures failed.]
[Attempting offensive countermeasures.]
'Raphael stop.' I commanded.
There was not much I could do to defend against Ajuka's magic probe.
Raphael may be a magic artificial intelligence with quantum computer processing speed, but no matter how efficient it is we won't be able to defend against super-class demonic power with high-class power.
Launching an attack would also not help the situation.
"Hmmm." Ajuka hummed to himself, processing whatever results he was getting from his scanning.
"You didn't mention he also has demon and dragon DNA and she has inactive god DNA." He leveled an accusing glare at Serafall.
"Forgot, teehee." She did a cute pose in deflection.
"They don't have any trackers or monitoring devices as far as I can tell," Ajuka noted causing Serafall to sigh in relief, "and he does have my DNA."
"That's right, he's our son."
"You can adopt him as your son if you want Serafall but I don't have time to look after him."
"But Juka-chan he's our son, how could you be so cruel." Serafall pouted at Ajuka.
"It's fine Serafall, I'm not really either of your sons, it's just a bit of your DNA used in my creation."
Ajuka nodded as if agreeing with my viewpoint while Serafall had crocodile tears in her eyes as she pouted.
"It's ok Kay-chan, I'll take care of you and love you and dress you up like a magical boy and teach you magic and introduce you as my son." Serafall consoled as if I was some neglected child.
"Even if that meany over there wants to abandon responsibility after making a child!" she continued in mock disdain.
Ignoring her planning to dress me up as a magical boy, although I will definitely correct her idea later, I rolled my eyes at her antics as Ajuka did the same.
"See see!" She exclaimed triumphantly, pointing at me and Ajuka. "He's definitely your son, he does the same eye roll as you!"
I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes again at that.
"I don't mind, especially since I originally sought you out for protection, though I definitely wont be dressing up as a magical boy." I felt I had to make that clear early on.
"Owww, pwease Kay-chan?" She lowered her torso so she could look up at me with puppy dog eyes.
"No." I overrode the instinct to submit to the puppy dog eyes.
"Though wont adopting me cause problems with the rest of the devils, especially considering you were never actually pregnant?" I wondered.
"It's fine, just show them your ice, since it's the same as mine it should serve as proof. And if they don't accept that I'll just blast them away as Miracle Levia-tan✭."
I just shrugged.
If she was going to accept me as her son officially I would gladly accept the powerful backing.
I'll just have to avoid being turned into a magical boy.
"Lillian will be with me though." I declared.
"That's fine." She accepted easily, presumably due to knowing Lillian had nowhere to go and could cause problems if just left alone somewhere.
"Oh, I just had the best idea!" Serafall exclaimed before the conversation could continue.
"I'll introduce you to So-tan, she's around the same age as you but she's just the most cute and adorable and amazing little sister. Much better than Zechs-chan's little sister. You can be her bestist friends, but not better than her big sis though."
I ignored Serafall as she started rambling about her little sister, already showcasing her sis-con tendencies that will only grow as Sona gets older.
"Ajuka, Lillian has a problem. From what I can tell she's missing part of her sould responsible for memories so she can only remember the past week. Do you know of a way to fix that?"
"It's possible to fix if you find her soul fragment naturally. Alternatively, you could store her memories in some other medium but souls are both incredibly strong and fragile at the same time. It would be very easy to cause the rest of her soul to start breaking apart."
Lillian clung to me tightly in fear at Ajuka's insensitive words. Noticing what his words had caused he spoke up again.
"You're fine for now, your soul is stable. We'll just have to be careful when fixing the problem that's all."
Lillian relaxed a bit but still held onto my arm.
"Your evil pieces work with the soul right?" I asked and he nodded.
"They don't change the soul's fundamental structure but you could describe it as infecting them with demonic power." He clarified.
"Would it be possible to make like a pair of pieces that could transfer memories from one to another. Then I would take one piece and she the other so my soul could store her memories for her."
This was the very rough idea I had come up with.
Since I couldn't find her missing soul piece or re-create it, I came up with the idea of storing the memories elsewhere.
Where else but another person's soul?
Ajuka looked up at the ceiling and fell deep into thought, contemplating my idea.
Serafall had also stopped ranting about her sister to refocus back on the conversation.
"It would theoretically be possible but not realistically. The one whose soul would store the additional memories would essentially have them forced into their mind as they were transferred, essentially stopping the mind from doing anything else and forcing the person into a vegetative state."
"Ah!" Serafall exclaimed, jumping up. "Then Kay-chan can do it. He just has to let his magic AI process the memories so his mind doesn't get affected."
"Magic AI?" Ajuka questioned, interest piqued.
"Yes yes, he said it was a mutation of his Astaroth trait, like having a second mind in his head to do that can do other stuff."
"That's not possible," Ajuka stated with finality.
"Even if it mutated with the help of the Zagan's clan trait of Life Manipulation?"
Ajuka shook his head and stared at me, clearly not believing my excuse as Serafall had.
Considering he was more familiar with the Astaroth clan trait it was understandable.
"Anyway, I will consider this but first I need to have a private discussion with Serafall, you two wait here."
He stood up and swiftly walked out of the room leaving us alone as Serafall followed him with confusion written on her face.
-----
"Serafall there's a problem with those two," Ajuka stated as soon as he had put up some magic barriers.
"What problem," she frowned, "I thought you said there was no tracker from Rizevim."
"Not that," he shook his head. "Their souls are much older than their bodies, but they match the bodies. This means they're not possessed but have possibly undergone some incomplete reincarnation."
"What so they're both adults in children's bodies? Are they spies?"
"I doubt they're spies, their DNA is exactly like they told you. Also, Cain could be considered an adult in a child's body but it would be accurate to describe Lillian as a child."
Serafall tilted her head in confusion, causing Ajuka to explain.
"Due to the missing part of Lillian's soul she can only ever hold a week's worth of memories, so, despite her soul being old, she really only has a week's worth of experience, she just may have knowledge she shouldn't yet."
"Ok that makes sense, but Cain is different?"
"Yes, Cain has no damage done to his soul so his memories as an adult should be intact, in fact, his soul is very powerful."
"Hmmmm." Serafall fell into thought.
"There's one more thing."
"What?"
"Cain is bound by a soul contract and it involves Lillian as a third party. In fact, her connection to him through the contract is what's keeping her soul stable, it's also the reason Cain's idea to use evil pieces to allow transfer of memory between them is possible at all."
"Ehhh, so who is Cain contracted with?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"That's the thing, I can't tell what being he is contracted with. The strength of the contract is far greater than any I could make even using all my power and tools. I believe only conceptual beings like Ophis and Great Red could make a contract that strong, and even then it would need to involve heavy terms."
Ajuka then fell into thought, puzzling over the enigma that was the two 'children'.
"Juka-chan," Serafall roused him from his thoughts after a moment.
"Don't overthink it, let's just go ask them." She declared before marching off towards the door.
Ajuka followed her interested in unraveling the mysteries whilst determined to asses if they were a danger to the devils before they left his research facility.