8

Lunch was a simple affair, with Rias and Akeno each sharing some of theirs with me. Conversation was light, yet informative because of my new skill with Warp Observation. It seems picking up on emotional imprints through the Warp was rather easy, and knowing the feeling behind someone's words helps tremendously when getting to know them. I mentioned Issei which caused Rias' devilish greed to shine through the Warp, so I'm sure he'll still be getting reincarnated.

After lunch, I spent some time learning how to teleport through the Warp and through devil magic. Learning both methods would give me options and give the Mage more data to improve on both of them.

The Gate of Infinity method of Warp travel is a crude, power-intensive technique. The way it works is to literally punch a hole in the Warp, and out the other side in the destination you want. So, of course, when I first successfully used it to teleport to the other side of the room, the Mage scoffed and made it better on the spot. His innovation made the Gate less like a bulldozer plowing through a house, and more like walking through the front door and out the back.

The devil's teleportation circle couldn't have functioned more differently than Warp teleportation if it tried. Instead of brute force, devil's used imaginary numbers or coordinates to pinpoint their start and ending location, then fed them into the magic circle, which was filled with formulae. The end result was the same, but transit was smoother, less power-intensive, and kept the user in control of the process the entire time through the magic circle.

While learning the devil method, the Mage reported that devil magic is not just powered by imagination. There were equations and natural laws that the devil's unconsciously followed while casting, which influenced the end result.

For example, a devil that wanted to cast gravity magic first had to define gravity to themselves. Then they had to convince their magic to purposefully ignore or superimpose a new definition of gravity in its place. This allowed the devil to ignore the law of gravity without going through the extremely costly, and dangerous, procedure of breaking a physical law. At the moment the magic is cast, there are, in essence, two laws of gravity; one relevant to the spell, and one relevant to the rest of the universe.

Leaving the Mage to play mad scientist with the magic circle Rias gave me earlier, I turned my attention towards the summoning flyers I was also given at the same time. The mechanics of a summoning had been explained to me and they seemed simple enough. Summoned devils get payment and energy for fulfilling requests or services. The more difficult the request, the higher the reward and power increase the devil received.

My mind wasn't on the power a potential summon could grant me though. I had a different goal in mind. After a night of stressful events caused by the ROBs, a morning of innocent teasing from Rias, and a day of power-munchkining courtesy of myself, I was feeling the need for a particular kind of satisfaction. And thanks to my meta knowledge, I knew the perfect target for some stress relief. That target being a certain student with a mind full of unfulfilled desires, and the uncanny ability to guess the size of equipment a man was packing: Aika Kiryuu.

First, however, I had to get a flier to her and convince her to actually use it. After going through two different Rube-Goldberg machines designed to get the flier to Aika unnoticed, the Blank stepped in with an idea.

I may or may not have pouted and grumbled something about 'ruined fun' but his solution was a lot simpler. I could simply send the flier through a teleportation circle right to Aika's seat. Of course, I didn't actually know where she sat but that was solved easily enough with some divination.

Even with the Mage, the King, and I working together, the divining took an embarrassing amount of time. We were basically blind firing at a blank wall and trying to hit something on the other side. Actually, that might have been simpler than looking for a fictional character turned real person based only on general appearance and personality. Ha, the things we do in pursuit of women.