A Curse Upon Thee 3-10B

The sky was really pretty in Kyoto this time of year, an undeniable part of a beautiful Japanese summer as the months moved into May.

Unfortunately — “FINN!” — he wasn’t really able to enjoy it all that well right now.

Mostly because the world had just gone stupid, blue sky and white clouds replacing gray concrete and black asphalt. A rusty gutter line flipped past him sideways, the earth moving against him as he flew off the ground.

By the time his own name had even caught up to him, old concrete had already cracked and given way around his shoulderblades, a cloud of gray dust puffing out into steamy air and vanishing against the humidity.

A groan slipped his lips as he fell forward, the factory wall letting him go to drop a solid six or seven feet onto the ground. One knee folded out from under him, another groan joining the first as warm water soaked straight through his slacks.

Warm… He shook his head, skin crawling as his hearing slid back to him before his balance could offer the same kindness. And with his hearing came the sound of something hissing behind a thick fog of white.

Nothing broken… No, but there was something bleeding. 

One palm flat down in the water, Finn shoved himself up and onto both feet. The red trailing down into his eye from a split somewhere up in his hairline was a problem but not the biggest one right now. A hand went up to rub it off, five fingers trailing higher and into his hair as he slicked it back.

Somehow, even that worked with his surprisingly pliant locks, his own blood acting like top-grade conditioner. Weird.

Still, he had bigger problems. Later.

He rolled one shoulder, that same shoulder complaining as if it had a choice to do anything but listen to him. Cuts on the head always bleed like a bastard. He nodded to himself, one eye half-blind as he blinked the liquid away as much as he could. Don’t mean a damn thing.

He was pretty sure head cuts weren’t that bad, right?

Someone had told him that once.

Did he remember the name? No.

But it was someone someplace somewhere and that was good enough for him.

“FINN!”

Yeah. Yeah, I’m comin’...

One eye shut itself before all he could see was red and Finn forced one half of his gaze up and at the steam-covered parking lot in front of him. Idiot…

The insult was double-sided, both for himself for getting hit and the Devil stomping right at the girl in the purple dress. He might have been the one that got his spine introduced to a wall by something that talked with its hands more than its mealy mouth, but it was the one dumb enough to turn its back on him right now.

Finn took a step forward and almost stumbled back into the water leaking out from some burst pipe. …okay, did it give me a concussion?

Hopefully, not, but the last few minutes were already a chaotic mess. After the thing had screamed at him right from the start and Finn met it with his own fist, he’d have had to be blind and stupid to miss what showed up in the air above it.

BOILER DEVIL : STEAM-PACKED TERROR
GRADE: TWO

Pressure sealed beneath iron and flesh.
Built to rupture. Born to scald.

The grin across his face had been smug as smug as it had ever been because that was clearly an easy job. Half a million yen and home by two. Finn shook his head again, still blinking through blood and looking like a pirate without the peg-leg. Real smart, McHale.

Five minutes after he’d gone into the fight cocky as a rooster, half the lot was packed under steam and the asphalt half-flooded with water hot enough to redden his palm; Michiko’s estimate and his own eyes lying to him about how strong this thing was.

Whatever. He shook his head again as he finally found his feet and charged forward.

The fog parted around him, Finn already spotting purple-flecked green flames as they tore through the air and splashed against a big-bodied bastard. Copper skin — the metal, not the color — bulged outward, a torso swollen out past the point of being barrel-round under that dull material. Veins ran thick, each one pipe-shaped and dented over and under shoulders and thighs till they joined valves standing off its spine and neck.

What little face the thing had sat back inside a round opening rimmed with rusted teeth, the whole thing looking closer to a furnace door built under a skull.

If that wasn’t enough, something pounded — loud and hard — inside of its body, the sound slow and with a knock to it; more like a radiator than anything else.

Another flare of green went across that thing’s body, Mal shouting his name again.

“I heard you!”

“Then do something, you stupid sorcerer!” The green caught along the pipe that was the thing’s spine, flickers of jade crawling and creeping up in a way fire shouldn’t.

I’m working on it! Finn grit his teeth and waited for the flinch from the flames; that green enough to take the arm off an Index 1 the other day, clean at the elbow. Or… not?

The thing barely even moved as those flames tracked over its rusted hide, doing little more than boiling the water off its skin and adding more steam to the air.

A wide-eyed Mal took a step back, mouth open as her heel almost went out from under her against a piece of broken asphalt.

Shit- Finn’s eyes went wide enough to match hers as he caught the other thing, the green around her fingertips already guttering at the edges. Stupid!

That one was for her this time, Mal constantly throwing since the Devil tore itself free from the old factory wall. Five straight minutes of nonstop barraging and even that dumb grace that followed her footsteps started looking more purposeful than thoughtless.

The Devil didn’t miss it either, not as a valve on its shoulder popped free in a jet of thick white steam. With a noise like a train, the thing bellowed forward in a rocket launch.

Fuckfuckfuckfuck! Finn was already moving too, legs knifing the ground as he brought his hands together. Hope this works! The technique was a new one, even newer than his Flash Forge even if he technically had the idea for it first. C’mon!

“Hya!” With a grunt and something inside him he could only think of as a whoosh, Finn pulled his own Cursed Energy out of his gut and pushed it out with all his focus on one target. “鼓舞印 — Kobuin!”

鼓舞印 — Kobuin

RALLY BRAND!

The world stuttered to a stop for one split second as red flashed around Mal’s body, Finn feeling the words to the technique embedded inside him. For another ugly second, the CE just sat around her like a bad neon sign and he felt his stomach drop low as his chest went cold a-

As it caught.

The haze pulled tight and sank all the way from head to toe, humming bright as Mal went sideways the instant a fist came down where she’d just been. The street cracked apart, asphalt folded beneath it as boiling water gushed on impact, but the fae had already cleared it by a good four feet — the girl cackling like a witch.

…huh.

It worked.

Not perfectly, but it worked well enough; the juryoku burned in his mind’s eye as Mal jumped around with renewed vitality and speed. Two-thirds of it doing nothing.

It might have even been more than that, but it didn’t matter anyway as that leftover third had her moving half again as fast as she had been ten seconds back. That by itself was enough to put her somewhere north of any Olympian.

“Move!”

Mal moved the instant Finn charged forward, fingers laced into a Ram sign and a brighter red flooding down into the gaps between his knuckles. “Enchō Jutsushiki—”

One.

Then two.

Then three on both hands in between four fingers; Flash Forge forming six thin knives made out of a blazing red fire. “—Shuntan!”

With a grunt, he threw his arms out and all of them shot out and sunk deep into the Devil’s centerline — chest, shoulder, and low in the gut where the barrel was thickest. The Boiler Devil finally gave in, one leg going out to the side as the big thing staggered.

There we go. Fire still worked, at least.

Then every valve on the Devil’s torso started rattling all at once, that wide grin sliding clean off Finn’s face as the air above it bent.

Wha-

A single vein down its forearm split open along the whole length and sprayed — “Nngghh, hothotfuckhot!”

Boiling water tore out hard enough that Finn was barely fast enough to duck for cover, his shoulder taking the brunt of it as his jacket sleeve opened up and the skin under it felt all the pain.

He jumped for cover, Mal already under her own hiding spot, as that steaming jet took the already-peeling paint off the factory wall.

“HOT? Hot, yeah? Course it's hot!” That rusted mouth cracked wide open, the thing’s voice echoey and fast with every syllable pushed out too close to the last. “That’s the whole point, dumbass! C’mon, say it, say it again!”

Finn ducked low, another boiling jet nearly scoring the hair off his head. “Shut up!”

“You shut up!”

“You shut up!”

“No you!”

“No you!”

“NO—!” Steam blasted out of both those bowled-legs, that lumbering charge turned into another hydraulic shot over thirty feet of water-logged asphalt. “YOU!”

Finn got his forearms up in time for the first punch, the force behind it enough to slam him back a third of that same distance. The second was even harder, but Finn’s guard still held even where his feet didn’t. The third…

Blue eyes went wide, a pained grunt flying with him as he got put through a chain-link fence at speed, the eighteen-year old coming up spitting mad and sopping wet. Okay, plan B.

The Devil came at him again, before Plan B could move from thought to action, steam blasting out the right shoulder and right hip both. With a roar, the Boiler Devils’ whole body corkscrewed with a release of both jets, Finn juking to the right as it tore past him.

…wait a second. Finn blinked as he saw it catch its balance, the Devil slamming back to the ground on both feet. It only took another blink, the Boiler ballooning slowly again as it turned around to face him. Oh, you can’t vent when you feel like it, can you?

Clearly, all that pressure it was building up had to go somewhere. …alright.

One hand dropped to his waist and came up with Slaughter Demon, Finn tossing the blade before snapping it out of the air in a reverse grip. New game.

Boiler charged and he met it halfway, the dagger darting out.

A knife took a pipe-vein and opened the thing lengthwise, water pressure blowing out sideways from the Devils’ left thigh in a spray strong enough to knock out its leg. “GAH! Y-you little—!”

“Mal!” Finn gave it another cut along the arm, flipping back before he could take another ground-cracking punch. “Mal! Push it left!”

“I see it!” The green tore out again, Mal’s aim going from its body to the Devil’s head. It might not have done much damage but it was definitely an annoyance, enough to herd the thing back just a bit as it bellowed.

It was buying time, and that was all Finn needed, watching and waiting as the Boiler Devil tried to vent. He could see it now — a bulge under the ribs on the right, copper hide stretching and bulging as it went up and up, up along the—

Shoulder!

Finn charged forward, Cursed Energy flooding his legs as he forced himself sky-high. The Devil’s eyes went up as Finn twisted, hips gathering all the momentum they could muster as red fire blazed along his feet. “Kindle—!”

He twisted past the swing the Devil threw up at him, mouth still open as he brought his right heel down on the Devil’s bulging shoulder with all the force and fire he had in him. “—Kyaku!”

The world hitched one more time.

Finn didn’t see the words, but he knew they were there all the same; the same way you knew when a room wasn’t empty.

Fire went into the stressed vein, the pressure packed too tight and nowhere else left for it to go but out. Just like that, the Boiler Devil came apart from the inside; boiling water and steam and blood and guts flying free along with four feet of brass pipe in pieces.

Yet again, Finn McHale went flying.

This time, though, he caught himself on the way down and landed with a splash on the cooling water as the Devil tipped back, folding over sideways until it crashed to the ground.

Finn stood there with his chest going, red still up around Mal. With another grunt, he let go of it and watched the technique flicker to nothing. Least I finally figured it o-

He froze in place for just a moment, eyes flitting down to his hands where his palms had split open; blood still in the creases and three knuckles opened up from punching straight metal.

He closed his fist. …the hell?

Open.

Close.

Open.

Close.

Something… something was different. The Cursed Energy sat differently, and so did the rest of him too — the flow fuller, wider, like he’d been drinking through a coffee stirrer and someone just handed him a proper straw or… or something… The hell?

“...huh.”

"What's wrong?" Mal's boots splashed over, dress heavy with water to the knee but that stupid parasol was — of course — still there. “Finn?

“I…” He shook his head. “I might’ve leveled up.”

She stopped walking.

"...what?"

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Par for the Course - 300 GP
Take down your fifth Grade 2 (equivalent)

ROLL: Hero's Like You Are Poison — 200 GP

DxD Universe | Modus

You are a poison of the past, okay that's a mean way to put it, but in short you are a descendant of a hero, you can pick pretty much anyone, a few examples being Cao Cao or Siegfried, this grants you a moderate raw power boost and talent boost in whatever your ancestor was good at.

Grimoire Points: 200