Thousand Years

A/N: Sorry for the major delays guys. As you may have known, I was in DC a few weeks ago for a business trip and when I came back it was the Holidays and I had to spend time with the family. I also got really sick while I was in DC even though I feel like I'm over it, I still have a cough. Anyways, this is going to be the last chapter before we start getting toward 'canon' and will be skipping hundreds of years at a time, so sorry if it feels rushed.

.~.~.~.

I was always told, via stories of my previous life, that humans weren't meant to be immortal. That they would eventually become apathetic to everything after a few hundred years and whatnot, but that simply wasn't the case.

I was over 1000 years old by now, and despite having really seen and done just about everything, I still didn't feel all that apathetic. I even asked Velzard about this and she looked at me as though I were stupid for wondering about that. She told me that if that was possible, then that would mean she, who was 19,000 years old, by the way, should also be apathetic to the state of the world. She said it was probably due to the presence of Unique and Ultimate Skills which reside in the soul.

Her theory on this was that because they are powers born directly from the soul, they act as an 'anchor' which doesn't allow personality/value drift. It was probably why I also found I could literally eat the same thing for over a decade and never get tired of it. Trust me, I've done it as an experiment. It was also why Velzard and I never got tired of... bedroom activities... no matter how many times we did it.

However, just because I discovered my personality won't change due to the weight of time, doesn't mean that I haven't changed. I'm a lot calmer and wiser than I was back in my first century. I can read most people like a book and finally came to understand why Velda loved humans so much.

Elves, Dwarves, Beastmen, Vampires, hell, even daemons were all pretty much the same as all the others of their species. It was like there was only a select few archetypes for their personalities which, after the first three hundred years, made it easy to decipher any of their wants, desires, and ambitions. Almost universally, Elves tended to love nature and magic, look down on humans, and even had subtle masochistic tendencies. Dwarves were very tactile and materialistic. Liking to drink, craft, tinker, and party. Beastmen were all about strength and a 'might-makes-right' mentality.

It was only humanity that deviated from this norm. Humans were odd. They'd say one thing and then do another. Some of the most untrustworthy people could turn out to be surprisingly reliable when the time came. They were both Greedy and Charitable at the same time. They'd act very lustfully in groups and in public (with cat-calls and harassment) but were surprisingly chaste in private, being more sensitive to their loved ones. A species full of powerful individuals who were really cowards but at the same time brave individuals who were total weaklings. They rarely considered the phrase 'might makes right' when it came to situations and made decisions based on their own personal morals and values.

A Beastman wouldn't ever save a total stranger from being bullied, picked on, enslaved, etc unless it was their job, but a human might. An elf would let a man or woman die from their own hubris, but humans would try to save everyone if they could do so, oftentimes putting themselves in danger. A dwarf would never fight a pointless unwinnable battle, but humans would, more often than not, fight to the bitter end rather than surrender.

It was fascinating.

Perhaps that was why Velda loved them so much and why I came to like them as well.

...

Milim and Yumina left me when they were both 20.

I had thought the reason Milim was so carefree and childlike in canon was that she awakened as a True Demon Lord when she was young due to Gaia's death, but that couldn't be further from the truth. That was just her personality from the get-go.

Perhaps that was why Milim left to go on a journey with Velgaia at that time. It wasn't like I couldn't keep my eye on her with [Clairvoyance] so I didn't have any reason to worry. They all formed a party together and quickly became the first S-Ranked Party in the Guild known as Dragon Wing.

Yumina was the party leader with Milim was the sub-leader. Velgaia was something of their mascot, being a green-scaled dragon, and Obera tagged along to protect Milim and Yumina, whom she had grown attached to over the years of guiding them. Obera actually became a Fallen a few years after the first Tenma War, so she wasn't affected by it again after the first time.

I was so proud of them when they left to become adventurers. I gave Milim Asura, a sword Velda had given to me to pass onto her when the time was right a while back. I then gave her the Unique Skill [Wrath], since I still had the information used to make up the Skill from the time I had [Satanael].

Velzard gave Yumina a sword she'd created after spending years painstakingly infusing her aura into some magisteel, which transformed into Dragotite using her aura, making it in no way inferior to Asura. She gave it the name Preta due to its unique property of consuming energy from its target, making them weaker. I then replicated the Soul Surgery that Velda had done on me with her and Yumina to transfer over the Unique Skill [Envy] to Yumina. I kept a copy of the information of [Envy] so that I could use it to fuse into [Gabriel] at some point to become [Cthulhu] in the future, but the energy required for that fusion was too much for the current me. /1\

The hope was that one day, they'd be able to awaken these skills to their Ultimate Level, but until then, this gave them a substantial boost in power.

I had edited [Wrath] to work in conjunction with Milim's [Magicule Breeder Reactor] which helped her with controlling her power output tremendously. I also removed the emotion aspect of the Skill, so even if she does become pissed off enough to evolve it into its Ultimate form, she won't lose her sense of reasoning as she did in the canon of the story.

[Envy], on the other hand, was the perfect skill for Yumina. Because it allowed her to absorb the energy of her opponents, it allowed her to keep up with Milim in the friendly rivalry they've had since they were children. Before she got it, Yumina was consistently losing to Milim more and more often due to Milim's growth in power outstripping her own, but now, Yumina was winning more often, as her technique was better.

I loved Milim, she was my daughter in all but name, but a part of me was really happy now that Yumina was able to keep up and defeat her now.

Speaking of daughters I was proud of, Lilith has been doing extremely well for herself in recent years. Her offspring are highly fertile with minimal power loss upon giving birth, so the Succubus race was thriving, with tens of thousands of members in only a few hundred years and over a million by the time I was 1000. Interestingly, Incubi seemed rather rare, maybe 1 in 500, so there were only a few in her ranks.

Lilith set up a kingdom on the island north of where Ingrassia would eventually be established but south of the Dark Continent where Guy resided. She used that place as a base of operations for her operations in what was shaping up to be the Central Nations.

That's right, Central Nations. Since Milim never went Berserk and fought with Guy, turning the western part of the continent into a wasteland, the area that would have been known as the Western nations in canon is now the 'Central Nations' due to there being other human and Demihuman nations where the desert used to be.

Anyway, succubi will succubi, so Lilith set it up, with a little help from me, to have succubus brothels in every major city and kingdom in the Central and Western Nations. They would get their clients drunk at the bars and get them to spill all the information they knew while blowing their minds with supernaturally good sex... or so I hear. (*Ignores angry Velzard behind me*) This information could then be reported directly to Lilith, making her the world's foremost information baron with the widest-reaching network in the world.

Everything went pretty well for me for a long time. I was even able to turn over leadership of the Guild to a successor when I was 900 and retire for a while with Velzard. The world was a much more different place than the one I still vaguely recalled from my previous life.

For instance, there were only Six Demon Lords. Guy, Lilith, Dagruel, Valentine (Luminous), Dino, and Zelanus. Milim still wasn't a Demon Lord and Carrion and Frey weren't born yet. Ramiris never lost her strength and was seen as the Queen of the Spirits in public and as my ally, so she was closer to a Hero than a Demon Lord. Evelyn never became Kazaream, so she never created Clayman either. So we had this awkward number of Demon Lords that wasn't quite an Octagram yet.

Things continued on smoothly for the next few centuries, only briefly heating up due to the occasional surge of monster attacks but then, one day, what I can only assume was around a thousand years before that slime's arrival, I felt a sudden shift in the fabric of space-time.

I was actually flying around with Velzard freezing small volcanic islands in the middle of the Ocean when I felt it. I paused mid-flight, surprising Velzard, who also came to a stop.

"Al? What's wrong?" Velzard asked.

"I... I don't know. Come here for a moment." I said, trying to make sense of what has happening in the territory of Nightrose.

Velzard flew over to me at once and I embraced her in a long hug which I followed up with a kiss on the forehead. I don't care if the entire world was coming to an end, Imma still kiss my waifu whenever she gets too close.

After separating the kiss, Velzard and I opened our eyes and were in a different location from where we were before. I had teleported us to the empty grasslands under Luminous' protection and where the disturbance was coming from. We both descended and gazed upon the twisting space that sat before us.

I got my hopes up a little bit that it might be Velda and Lucia FINALLY returning, but was disappointed when, instead of them, I saw a beautiful young woman with silky long black hair and deep blue eyes appear before us.

"Damn. I thought they'd be something else." I cursed under my breath.

Velzard smiled wryly at my comment before a sudden smug glint crossed her eyes. "Oh! My husband! You've decided to introduce me to your mistress now? How could you betray me so?" She asked, overdramatically.

"No, wait! She means nothing to me! I don't even know her!" I tried to defend myself.

"Alaster!" The woman cried as she dove at me and hugged me tightly.

I was completely stunned by this action and Velzard also locked up.

"I'm so glad you're ok! Please don't do that again!" The woman said, seemingly with tears in her eyes.

"Huh?" I asked her.

"A-Alaster..." I turned to look at Velzard who was looking absolutely devastated. "Y-you actually brought me to our mistress...?" Velzard asked.

"What? No! I-" I tried to defend myself but Velzard cut me off.

"I always thought that if you were going to cheat on me it'd be with that elf, but now I see I wasn't vigilant enough," Velzard commented darkly

I was shocked and mentally prepared myself to defend against an attack, only to have jumped to conclusions.

"You scumbag!" Velzard cried as she turned and flew away.

"Oy! Vel!" I called out to her but was stopped by the arms still hugged around me. I turned to look at the woman with an angry voice. "What the hell was that for!?!" I asked.

The woman holding onto me looked back up at me, smiled smugly, and let go before sticking her tongue out at me. "That's for getting Sensei and Sensei together, what you did to Big Bro, and all the other trouble you've given me Master!"

"Huh?" I asked confused.

.~.~.~.

A/N: I'm thinking that once this story is done, I'll re-write the other route this one went down. I have a lot more knowledge about what's canon now and I don't really like the way that one went, which is why I made this story. What do you guys think?

.~.~.~.

/1\:

In the WN, the fusion of [Leviathan] and [Gabriel] together took all of Velzard's energy and was done by Ciel. She then refilled Velzard's energy using Rimuru's Turn Null energy, so it's possible she used some of it to help the fusion. I made it so the fusion process is too energy intensive for Alaster right now but we will see it in the future.