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I swing by one of my restaurants in the morning and grab an assortment of different foods to take with me to ' class ' with Zola. After three days and abusing the Astaroth trait to pack in everything she was teaching me I can use a low-count rune sequence.

Writing a sentence in the ancient runes can quickly cause a problem if you aren't sure of what will happen, instead of aiding a person you could pull them apart. The sequence chains are called yaun, so a ten-word sentence or chain would be a ten-yaun sequence. The more words you weave together the more drastic they change each other's effects.

Writing water and earth could make something into mud, but adding one word like enhance could make the result become an enchantment to boost the water and earth element in something or someone. Changing the word enhance to defend could block the elements or protect the elements from each other depending on how it is worded.

Even with Zola who has been studying them for thousands of years and also made a pocket dimension using them as its backbone, I still haven't covered a fraction of the alphabet. The rune tablets that are with the crystal dragon Jacob are practically singing to me to come to collect them.

Zola even off-handedly mentioned that she used to have some different runes and that before she fully learned them they were stolen.

I finish pocketing the food that I ordered and teleport to join the mad scientist.

----

"Good morning." I unload the steaming hot food onto a clear enough table and move things away that might fall onto the plates. Zola is standing beside a column that she started working on after coming to some new conclusions about runes by actually teaching them. Perspective seems to help a lot when it comes to a thing like ancient runes.

"Your back already? You just left." I shake my head and slide in with a plate of pancakes and imitation syrup.

"I left over ten hours ago at this point, you should probably go change clothes after eating. You have the same stain from when the shadow crystal splattered on your back." She doesn't take her eyes off the pillar and wraps a hand around her back and touches the darkness attributed byproduct of an overloaded shadow crystal exploding behind her when she stopped watching it for a moment. The fact she is still alive despite the near-death explosions I have witnessed is the work of some kind of god.

And it's not a lack of trying to be safe and more that the nature of pushing the very edge of magic that is untouched for the most part, is dangerous.

The lab quite literally has a purge system that could kill an unprepared demon overlord if they were just standing in here when it goes off. That's just in case something goes REALLY wrong and she has to abort the whole lab and separate it from the pocket dimension. In the process, the space rending itself away would kill anyone unprepared to teleport out or have some super luck.

"What is this?" She finally walks over and stands beside me.

"This is pancakes, those are muffins and they have different berries baked into them. The rest is just basic demon world food that is prepared in different ways." She nods and sits to the side of me instead of the other side of the table like she did the first time we ate together.

"Will you tell me about the devil world some more today?" After signing a contract to not disclose any of the ancient runes she has taught me to anyone without her consent I also made it so that she couldn't tell others about my secrets. After only a full day together with her curious probes of spirit energy, she was able to tell I was a different species from anything she has seen before.

I told her the basics of me being a different species from a different world, she dissected me with her eyes when I showed off some basic magics. My teleportation had her practically green with envy as she went over the difficulty of such a spell.

"Well, what would interest you specifically?" She takes a bite of bacon and thinks.

"Where there dragons in your world? Your dragon aura would lead me to believe that there was." Well, the correct answer would be no, but since DxD world is my cover story I guess the answer is yes. Ophis would probably be a concept she would spend the rest of the day trying to understand if I told her about her.

"Yea, my favorite two dragons were the heavenly dragons who are a step behind the dragon gods. Their names were Ddraig and Albion and they were rivals who fought every chance they got. Eventually, a god sealed them both inside of an artifact that gave the wielder their dragon abilities and they still fight each other through their wielders." She nods eagerly and I continue about how the two would duel and then when their wielders died the cycle would repeat with new wielders.

"So, their souls were inside of the artifacts that naturally seek out a wielder? What are the criteria for possessing their artifact?" Well, if you use Issei as a baseline for requirements then they must be pretty low. I don't hate the guy by any means, but the dude had a screw loss with those girls jumping on him and he shy's away. That or the anime plot screwed him a little too hard to keep the rating down for TV.

"It was pretty much random. An entire system of artifacts randomly choosing wielders and causing trouble where ever they go." The true Longinus would wreck shop in this world, dark beings and random half-gods to slay.

"That sounds pretty dangerous. But what were the ability's the dragons gave to their wielders?"

"The ability to divide anyone's power in half and add it to yours and the other one doubles the power of the wielder every ten seconds or something like that." The look on her face at this point is a true daze and not a fake daze.

"Double their power every ten seconds? How is that possible?" I shake my head since I can't even fathom a random anime powerup like that.

"No clue, it isn't worth the trouble though with how big of a target gets painted on your back for having it. Most people that get it will die from overusing it just to defend there self from people or their rival." I definitely am not just jealous.

"I see." She goes silent and is probably thinking of a way to try and replicate the effects, I wonder what she will come up with.

----

"This should cause the gem to hold the energy inside of it until it is either drained or overloaded, Right?" I show her the small project I started to test my current understanding of the runes. I am itching to go and grab the runes from the crystal dragon and need to distract myself with something else. We will hit the crystal valley after the wedding, Catherine is very busy setting it up and can't drop things to deal with a Hydra-style secret organization.

"It should be mindful of the energy's type though. That crystal has a slight water affinity by nature and if you store something in it that conflicts with that it may explode sooner than it should." I frown at that because I spent fifteen minutes drawing the tiny runes.

Holding the crystal on my palm away from my body and conjuring a shield I begin to try and store evil light inside. It glows after a moment and I stop in case it explodes, watching it I am excited since this could be used to make Laser style weapons if I do it properly. An army equipped with blasters similar to star wars could do a good bit of damage. In this world, magic cannons are pretty outdated and this would be a massive leap in technology, bad side is I would have to charge them all individually.

I charge it to its full capacity and it took a tenth of my full power reserves, I know it was full because it finally exploded and chunks of gem pelted me.

"Well, at least it was a small gem." My eyes go wide and I realize I wouldn't have to charge a ton of little crystals if I charged one really big crystal. Then the tiny ones can be slotted into it with some kind of port and charge themselves off the reserves from the big one. Kind of like lanterns and their rings if I am honest.

I quickly bid farewell to Zola and teleport to find a huge crystal, maybe a gold crystal that holds a ton of energy naturally and could probably work.

----

Three days of trial and error later and even Zola helped me out after I explained what I was doing and I am standing Infront of a spherical gem that is crystal clear. Runes scatter across it in patches, when we drew them in lines it didn't work as intended.

It was pretty easy to drain it of its natural energy to have an empty crystal and gold crystal doesn't have an affinity like the lesser crystal coins such as black, purple, and white. I place my hand on the input and push in half of my demonic power as evil light and stop after to check how it will work.

"Alright, try and put the cartridge into it and see if it will charge it." I slump into a chair and watch Zola insert the smaller crystal. I believe one of the reasons she helped me is that she also wants to have some of my energy bottled up to study. Won't do her any good but maybe she will be able to learn something else by studying it. The other main reason is she seems to enjoy working together after I helped her with her project and jumped to help me with mine.

"It worked!" She holds up a now glowing crystal and I can sense my evil light inside, with the improvements from Zola the cartridge knows when it is full and won't intake any more energy. We only had to blow up five to get the numbers right.

"I guess I can work on making a device to use the cartridge now." I tap my chin and imagine all arrays of weapons like light sabers and blasters and even bombs.

----

- Kia POV -

Today is the day.

Nova has been off ' studying ' with a woman named Zola, and he is getting closer and closer to her as time goes on. I won't be beaten again, not by some woman that came in just recently!

How do I know he is getting closer to her? The smell he carries of her is getting richer and richer each day he travels out. That means he is coming in contact with her more and more!

Nova arrived just a little while ago and after discussing with Athena and mom, they both decided to stay in other rooms tonight.

"Hey Kia, you doing ok?" Nova comes up from behind me scaring me since I was zoned out.

"I am fine Nova! I was just thinking about some different things." He smiles and nods.

"Make any progress with your domain?" I bring forth my domain and target him and he takes a moment before negating the effects. "Wow, you have made it so you can use your devour powers within your domain to drain energy. Does it work with normal spirit energy as well? If so then it would do wonders on a battlefield to drain the enemy's army, that and draining a person in a one versus one and empowering yourself sounds helpful."

I answer his questions, since he has started ' Studying ' with Zola he has been extra inquisitive. I smile internally when he walks off to take a shower and head to bed early.

Tonight is the night!