A Fae's Emporium 6 (Patreon)

Commissioned by InfiniteChaosRai

A Fae’s Emporium

Chapter 6

-VB-

It was time for her Rating Game against Riser Phenex, her fiance.

It was time for her to decide her future. 

Rias stared down at her hands. 

She’d given up … a lot for this. She wasn’t sure if this was how she wanted to win but she’s done it, and the fae had been disturbingly straightforward about what she was getting and what she paid for it. 

Which had to mean that she definitely got the worse end of the deal. 

But it was a deal that got her something truly powerful. 

She could feel it. 

And she feared it. 

She took a deep breath in and let it out. 

The bell rang. 

It was time. 

“Kaichou?” 

She looked up and saw her peerage looking at her. 

She smiled. 

“It’ll be alright!” she assured them, even though she herself felt a little ill at the thought of using her new power… that she had very little experience with. 

“Now, I know what you must be thinking. How are you supposed to use a power that you don’t know how to use?! Something like that, right?” the fae shopkeeper asked and she nodded. “Well, that’s why I’m going to do this.”

“Do what?”

He reached out and touched her forehead. 

And she screamed.

She shuddered. That had been like taking a dip in the brimstone lava lakes, and she would know exactly what that was like. 

She readied herself as did her peerage, and the magic circle underneath them glowed.

And in an instant, she was standing in a forest in the middle of a giant colosseum, not the waiting room for her team. 

She quickly looked around. Thick pine trees blocked her view a dozen meters beyond the clearing. Her side of the colosseum floor was slightly higher up, but it didn’t matter. When devils fought, such things like higher ground meant very little. 

“As planned, okay?” she smiled. “Go!” 

And her cute peerage sped off to find their targets and eliminate them. The only ones who remained were Queen Akeno, Bishop Asia, and Pawn Issei. 

The plan had four parts.

One, her mobile and durable peerage members would go out to hunt Riser’s peerage. 

Two, upon discovering the closest and first enemy, Issei and Akeno would move to reinforce while the others kept the Riser’s other peerage members back. 

Three, should anyone need healing, they would fall back to where Rias and Asia was, get healed, and go back out to fight. 

And this entire plan hinged on Riser not acting first. 

But based on his previous Rating Games… he wouldn’t. 

Finally, part four, when the rest of his peerage had been eliminated, Rias would step up and eliminate Riser as quickly as possible with her new asset. 

---

Yuuto found the first enemy: Shuriya. She was one of Riser’s many pawns.

And thus weak.

It took exactly three exchanges: a fake diagonal slash that missed with a plain sword to give her the illusion of being in control, a sudden surge of speed and appearance of his second elemental sword, and a stab to the stomach with the serrated cauterizing fire sword. 

She disappeared in motes of light as the Rating Games’ officials retired her. She would have died otherwise from having her innards falling out of her stomach. 

---

Koneko found the first real enemy who she needed help against. Yubelluna the Bomb Queen. 

Koneko immediately did her part in the plan. 

She fired off flares. 

And her queen responded.

For a split second, the dark skies above the colosseum brightened so brightly as to blind most of the viewers who didn’t expect Akeno’s lightning spells. 

And Yubelluna, who had been planning on her own cunning flanks, fell without being able to put her plans into action. 

---

Issei then rushed forward to help Yuuto with his second and third enemies. 

By, um, dress breaking. 

The shock, the shame, the embarrassment… Issei and Yuuto (latter with apologies on his lips) took care of the rest of the peerage, who weren’t as planned and coordinated as Rias’s peerage were. 

Then came Riser.

---

Riser… Riser was a Phenex. 

Phenex do not die. 

This was a fact in the Underworld. This was a fact that led to their house rising up in the first place. They used their immorality to such a degree that they had made a name for themselves during the Great War. 

The Shields of Hell. 

They were the mainline combatants. They were the rear guards. They fought because death was not a concern without very specific circumstances like a really powerful holy spell or strike from a very powerful angel.

Phenexs were one of the four reasons why the New Satan faction won, and one of ten reasons why the devils maintained the largest territory in the Underworld out of all factions across all pantheons. 

They were not just bloodline pillars but an actual pillar providing too many levers of power that kept the Devils as one of the major powers of the supernatural world. 

And all of it… came from their bloodline. 

The ability to regenerate and to provide that regenerate on demand through their tears. 

And Rias fired a Cero tinted with her Power of Destruction at one of the scions of said house. 

Riser Phenex, believing her attack to be just another magical spell, tanked it. 

Or so it seemed like at first.

---

See, White, the power I’ve granted her, was not a true Hollow. Not really. 

Though Aizen Sosuke of the Soul Society created it to become a Hollow, he took the souls of ten shinigamis to make it. It was why White’s Hollow form had so much black instead of the pure white that Hollows were known for. 

More so than that, White was a fully spiritual being, not magical like the Devils and Angels of this universe. Spiritual essence was different from divinity, which the angels had as a result of being what they were. All divine beings had spiritual essence and/or powers, but not all spiritual beings were divine. All magical beings had magic but not all magical beings had spiritual power. 

Now, add the differing rules of reality that White came from compared to Rias Gremory and the Devils. Just as the ExE worlds had different rules, so did DxD, which then differed from Hueco Mundo and Soul Society. 

But I naturalized that power for Rias. 

And then she added the Power of Destruction into its attack.

I watched gleefully as a spiritual attack borne from a twisted and corrupted being whose origins came from a near dozen soul purifying beings warped along with the Power of Destruction and struck someone who had minimal spiritual defense. 

Probably because he wasn’t expecting one. 

So White’s essence, which had already been “purified” after going through the filter that was Kurosaki Masaki and then fermented (a form of purification in many practices) inside Kurosaki Ichigo’s soul like natto, then got naturalized into this new environment and finally, to my surprise, got blended with the Power of Destruction. 

I laughed as the Cero not only purified Riser Phenex’s soul and essence as a Devil but then also destroyed his body.

And his soul… Oh God, his soul… started to leave towards Heaven.

Yeah. No.

I pulled out the fishing pole that I’d saved for occasions like these and threw the hook out. 

I watched as the spool whined as the line went out further and further and further and further…

Yank.

I reeled it in. 

-VB-

“Thank you for your patronage!” I said after a perfectly normal student left my shop after having purchased a bunch of school supplies and a few nicknacks. 

I put the money into the cash register … and then a bell rang. 

Oh, it was time! 

I hummed as I gestured for Medusa to take over the counter and walked to one of the rooms in the back.

Inside the room was a man-sized hydraulic press tube. Which had a spigot at the bottom.

I set a cup down underneath the faucet, opened the spigot, and then activated the spiritually treated machine. 

I waited as the machine pressed down into the metal tube it was set up with … and I heard sobs from within the machine as Riser Phenex’s purified soul got pressed. 

And phoenix essence dribbled out of the spigot. 

Once I had enough for a full cup, I closed the spigot and then turned off the machine. 

The press went back up, and Riser’s soul would slowly heal up over time. 

I took the cup, drank the content, and shivered in delight. 

“Now this is what I call a proper beverage. Infinitely regenerating healing juice!” 

I walked out of the room with a skip to my step and a smile on my face. 

-VB-

And exactly one month after signing the contract with Rias Gremory, White popped back in his jar.

Yup.

See… Rias Gremory signed a deal with the fae. She made sure the agreement was ironclad. That White was something good enough to win her the Rating Games. She made sure that I would be at a specific address at a specific time so that she could give something that was equal to White in value because she didn’t have anything to trade in at the time of receiving White from me. 

She did not specify the universe. 

She did not specify that I had to agree to what she offered. 

She did not specify that I had to like the payment. 

She did not specify what would happen if I didn’t get my payment in time.

So when she failed to show up to some other universe at the exact address she provided in a Japanese town that surely existed in both that universe and her universe and I didn’t get the payment…

White was stripped from her and popped back inside its jar.

“A true devil would have been kinder to you, Rias Gremory,” I snickered as I picked up White’s jar and walked over to the spot I’ve picked out during the month-long wait and placed him there. 

Rias Gremory had to deal with all of the trouble that came with killing someone in the Rating Game, an event specifically designed to prevent deaths, and lost the power that would have been good enough to justify her new position while I got a new infinite potion maker. 

“You are evil, master.”

“She’s the one who decided to test my patience during the contract writing!”

But hey, at least I helped her get what she really wanted, right? She couldn’t complain about that.