MSSch14

In the dark mountain peak courtyard overlooking a leap of faith possibly leading to the next floor of the dungeon, Vergil struggled to remain sane. He was inflicted with a curse, and instead of doing the intelligent thing and shaking it off after the battle, he let it linger. Vergil saw her with his fading memory, the chin she hated that made her call herself ugly, and her cloudy blue eyes were all that was left of her. Like a cell copied until it mutated, pieces were lost until he could only recognize pieces of her, and that hurt him more than her question. She had asked him why they never had children, which nearly broke him.

“We, no, I didn’t have the finances, and you were the breadwinner,” Vergil said.

It spoke in her voice mixed with the tune of a static ringing in his ears. “That wasn’t all; even when I warned you, you were afraid.” She threw him into a sacred sword of the charging Chien-Pao. “This is what you deserve.”

A spectral hand caught the glowing blade made of fighting-type energy wrapped around an icy fang. The fight wasn’t his concern. On the ring finger of his left spectral hand, he saw the discolored skin where he once wore a ring. On his left hand, the skin no longer showed the blemishes of his past. It wasn’t his original left arm, to begin with.

Vergil turned his attention to the feline as sparks from their attacks lit the courtyard. Fast, flexible attacks moved in a predictable pattern aiming to overwhelm him with speed and strength. Still, once he stopped the initial onslaught, the pokémon crumbled. A quick strike from a spectral hand crippled one of the pokémon’s legs; a glass canon wasn’t made to last.

He stepped forward, and a spectral hand lashed out and punched the pokémon. It mewled in pain as another blow crashed into it. Psychic attacks shouldn’t harm dark types. Except his spectral arms weren’t quite psychic-type attacks any longer. While the bones of the arms were made from psychic energy, the muscle and flesh piled atop them were made of fire and fighting-type energy.

“You think this can hurt me more than life has already.” Vergil unleashed a dozen rapid spectral fist blows on the creature driving it to the ground. “Do you think I can be beaten by my guilt?”

Her hands covered his eyes, and he stopped attacking. “It isn’t guilt that keeps me here.” She whispered in his ear.

“You aren’t her,” Vergil yelled. “And I don’t need to see to destroy my opponents.”

One of his spectral arms grabbed the Chien-Pao, and his other began beating it. The pokémon fainted, and Vergil tossed a pokéball. There would be no mistake. He wouldn’t be beaten or stopped by anything.

“You hate and love me too much to let yourself be free.” She said.

He shouldn’t have reacted to his delusion formed from the curse move. Vergil had forgotten what she looked like until her face had become blurry. Vergil didn’t know what to do. She was a link to his past.

“Maybe the real you also became a cultivator. If I could be selected upon my death, so could you. In this endless omniverse, it has to be possible.” Vergil said.

“What will you do if I exist in some form, but I love someone else or another version of you. Will you kill them and take their place.” She let go of him and slowly removed the hood covering her face. “Would you recognize me if you found me?”

He didn’t have a picture or anything to remember her. All that was left was the fading memory; the curse stared at him with parts of her face erased. It hurt to see that there was so little left. A century was a long time, especially for humans. Memories from before he began cultivating his mind were poorly remembered compared to after the transmission. Some of his memories were corrupted beyond recovery.

“No, it can’t be. I couldn’t have let enough time pass for this to happen; it has to be the curse.” Vergil gripped his head and began to unravel the curse affliction. “Once you're gone, I will see her in my memories again.”

A smile spread across the curse’s face. “I know what would hurt you the most. Every word I said was the trust.” The curse spun around, showing off her missing assets, parts of her body that he knew should have been that he couldn’t render. “You have forgotten me, and you are lost.” The curse said as he finally unraveled her.

Could the dragon balls reach out of the Dragon Universe into his home world? Could he use them to travel into the body of his old self with all his powers? Returning wasn’t good enough; he needed to return with the power to change the world. She wasn’t gone; he could still get to her, and then he could make things right. Cultivation brought out the beauty in people; if he taught her, no one would call her ugly again.

Before, he had forgotten a fundamental part of himself. Could she love the person he became? Unfortunately, he didn’t remember her name, so he could only try time travel.

“We didn’t have children because I was scared the hormones would get to you, we would fight, and then you would leave. I can make it right.”

Vergil walked towards the abyss as it stared back at him. He wanted to be lost in the dark until he couldn’t remember the pain of forgetting. The cultivator wanted to get so drunk on bloodlust that he didn’t remember his name. He dropped from the courtyard into the darkness, where flying pokémon struck at him.

The darkness ended in a bright sky overlooking a roiling ocean filled to the brim with sea life that didn’t care about a man broken by his past love. Several hyper beams charged below before he dodged a volley of them. He stopped his descent, hovering over the vast ocean filled with water and flying type pokémon that stretched across the horizon. He tried to picture the woman in his head, but she was no clearer than the curse.

A blue aura sparked around him as he felt his life force rage around him. So she was out in the multiverse, waiting for him to reach her. Maybe she was trying hard to find him, and he had lazed about fighting a war for the giant gods. That had to be it; if not, what would be left of him.

Vergil laughed at himself, the curse’s attack at a poorly healed injury to his psyche and his own failings. He wasn’t one of the ones who wanted to go back. Vergil was the first to understand that returning was a lie. Killing hope for the shiny carrot the demon middleman dangled in front of his group was the only way he survived. How did the curse get to him? He buried his heart.

Maybe it was guilt, but he shouldn’t feel it; he had nothing to feel guilty about. That’s what he always told himself. It was how he functioned when everyone else obsessed about going home. Vergil gained his freedom after only a century while the others still played the demon’s game. He stepped away from the table before he lost everything.

Was it that simple did he hold a flame for his love a century ago? It was so human. He missed and loved her and sometimes couldn’t live without her. When he fell in love, it was deeply until he grew up. His feelings were powerful things enough to convince him that love was a force that could conquer all and break down barriers. Society lied to him; men and women loved differently biology didn’t care about his feelings. This logic kept him together when he was on the verge of leaving the dungeon and forcing Mark to reach the advanced stage ASAP.

Another charge of hyper beams helped him refocus on reality. Unfortunately, they were terrible anti-air weapons with short ranges. While he wasn’t back to normal from the mental attack, Vergil had already begun piecing himself back together. The curse had used a lot of gas lighting and some of his memories to make him forget himself.

It didn’t change his guilt.

He missed her, and with his freedom, he would have wanted to share his life wither her. Instead, Vergil dove down and punched a garados while flying. The sea dragon bent over as he grabbed it by the tail with his extra arms, and spun. He threw the sea dragon high and let lightning crackle between his fingertips.

“I will never see her again.” Vergil blasted the Garados with lightning, and the monster froze in midair from the force of the lightning strike. “But I will love as I intend.” He twirled and ripped the scales off the monster with telekinesis. “My heart was yours; now you are gone, and so is it.” He let the scales fall, rippling in the flashes of lightning. “I will have a harem, and it will be lit.”  Lightning crashed in the background as he flew down on the pokémon in the sea and began destroying them.

He felt his qi take a tentative step toward the foundation-building realm. Vergil wanted to love again, and Rias, Akeno, and Cinder could begin to fill the void.

Quest

Foundation Building

Requirements:

Fully step into the Foundation Building realm

Break into the dungeon’s lowest floor and scare it into obedience.

Rewards

2,000,000 Zenni

1-week vacation coupon from 1 of 10 preselected dimensions.

Magic item – Black Dragon Slacks

All he needed to do was finish reaching the next realm and scare a dungeon core. That was easy, or that’s what he thought before his phone rang.

Calmly Vergil took time to check and see that it was Mark before answering. “I’m busy.”

“A scary lady here wants to see you and some punk that keeps demanding you duel him. I don’t know what to do. None of this is in the manual.” Mark said before taking a breath. “Sensei, please help us; we need you.”

Vergil hung up on Mark, and his phone immediately started ringing again. “You’re getting off, but your luck won’t last. The second I’m done taking care of business in my Sect, your ass is grass.”

…

Garlic watched the worm's progress and how he let the curse of a pokémon affect him. It was pathetic, and told Garlic all he needed to know to handle the fool. The demon glowed with the evilest shade of green imaginable within his crystalline prison as he began to take the genetics from some of the most beautiful women he had come across and spliced them with pokémon.

As a dungeon, Garlic could perform experiments and quickly absorb the undesirable results in real-time, learning from his mistakes. In a matter of minutes, he had completed experiments that would take labs of scientists decades to complete and compare results. As a dungeon, his processing power was immense, and he corrected his mistakes before running the next batch of tests.

The dungeon core saw his work and believed it was good enough before allowing the first in a long line of anti-Sect Master pokémon to leave his lab. His big tittied creation harbored some of the features of the pokémon it was spliced with but held a very human appearance.

If he desired love, Garlic would use it as a weakness to distract and slow down the Sect Master’s progress.

…

The smarmy, scared-looking human with an afro only calmed down when a text from the Sect Master told them the man was on his way. So naturally, Riser was excited about putting a mere human in his place. But, at the same time, Grayfia was more concerned about giving the man a painless death in exchange for helping her dear little sister-in-law.

She sensed nothing for fifteen minutes, and the door opened. His gaze burned with the fire of a thousand suns, intense with a passion that few humans possessed. The air rippled with a force of chaotic energy as if it didn’t know what force should dominate the room. She expected him to smile and try to suck up to her and beg to allow his little dojo to remain, but the human walked past her.

“I, the great Riser challeng,” Riser’s head exploded into flames in the blink of an eye. Grayfia was the only one to see the human move.

Riser’s peerage moved or tried to. A wave of electricity flowed over them, and they all fell over, paralyzed. She watched the man roll his eyes like a teenager before approaching the human she convinced to call for the man.

The Sect Master put his hand on his number 1 disciple’s shoulder. “Are you alright, Mark?” The human Mark slowly nodded.

The afroed man looked pensive. “I wasn’t able to place in the semi-finals. Am I going to be demoted?” The man looked like a child before the Sect Master.

It was unnerving that she still couldn’t sense the man. Worse, he brushed her off like she was an actual maid. Just because she dressed like a maid didn’t mean she should be treated as one. Didn’t he know she was the strongest queen?

“The tournament had nothing to do with ranking. It was just advertising, and you did a great job. Your battle against Goku was very impressive. Goku had a lead on you in power, and you still held your own. I have it on good authority he had been training for six months with the old turtle hermit before the tournament, while you only had three months.” The man continued ignoring her and patting the human’s shoulder. “Go and have some fun, Mark; talk up some girls, drink at the bar, or watch something on the multiversal net. I hear the Asari movies are full of mono-gendered lesbian sex.” The Sect Master said happily.

The man walked over to a throne surrounded by gaudy depictions of eagles, and an American flag hung behind him. After the Sect Master sat down, he took the position of a relaxed monarch and gave her an expecting look.

Grayfia stared at the flag, which was enough to spark a one-sided conversation. “It was a corpse before I was born; its skin was worn by its killers. Oh, my America, you died silently, fed upon by parasites who called themselves your children. They fooled us by wearing your skin, but I will choose to remember you for who you were, not the monster you became. Look upon her bloated cancerous majesty and despair.” The Sect Master said before smiling sadly. “Did you come here to do the same to me, Devil woman?”

She couldn’t sense him and couldn’t tell if he was in her weight class or not. He didn’t lack confidence, that was for sure. However, she could put those fears to rest if he expected her to be a monster who would try and slay him and wear his skin like some sort of perverse adult trick-or-treater. Grayfia’s mission had been one of mercy. It was unneeded after seeing him take out Riser and his peerage casually.