I laugh in the face of every transmigrator that sweats meeting his new parents and I shit on every edgy asshole that acts like they will never be able to replace the peerless family they left behind. Rias and I officially met Lord and Lady Astaroth of 72 Pillar Family fame and I had the pair eating out of the palm of my hand not even ten minutes into the encounter.
"And then I told them it was time to fit them for the cold metal hands of the Devil!" I laughed and my new dad laughed with me.
Lord Astaroth is a tall and skinny man with the family's lazy tilt to his eyes. The man is what those lacking in generosity might refer to as a… nerd. The guy is a huge history nerd, and prides himself on knowing a vast expanse of esoteric details about even the smallest happenings of historical significance.
With how old he is he could have easily grinded up beyond Satan class with just helping kids on their social studies homework, but he preferred working with scholars and specifically serving as the final authority on a scholarly debate.
Lord Astaroth's frequent travels into the human world to update his records from the various county recorders across the world had partially fueled Mini Dio's love of travel.
The other much weightier portion was the guy's insatiable lust for church girl booty.
My recent exploits in articefering and engineering has been simply shelved as my incredible Astaroth intelligence finding its appropriate outlet. The family had produced consistently the pinnacle of Devil intelligentsia from the founder to Ajuka weaponizing his autism, Astaroths are the finest minds in the underworld.
Or at least that is what our PR division pumps out as propaganda for the masses.
No one even questioned why my power level had shot up so much since the last time they saw me. After all it's not like I trained for it, that would be silly. I obviously had just come into my natural power by sitting on my ass all day like the rest of Devilkind.
Time and superior genes as an excuse for the win.
"Oh Dora," my mother smiled, "you simply must bring those young men down to hell for a concert after you replace their hands with versions capable of playing the music you have made."
Mother was a nerd of similar caliber to Father, but for fashion rather than history. She actually brought in far more revenue than he did over the years as her long life and dedicated study had given her a supernatural sense for the winds of change in the fashion industry, nearly always predicting the coming end of a trend and greatly narrowing down the next 'in' style, making her a popular summon among the hyper elite of the design world.
"Dio," Rias spoke up, "You can't just cut off their hands so they can play Metal better, you have to come up with something else, like homunculi or robots."
"Have you been rooting around in my basement?" I fixed her with my most intense cannibal stare, the weight of my countless victims bearing down on her, forcing out the truth.
"What? NO!" she denied, "Do you have a bunch of homunculi in your basement?"
"In the spirit of matrimonial harmony I feel it is best not to lie to you Rias." I said and then went back to eating a piece of chicken.
She kept looking at me like I was going to reveal the existence of my homunculus experimentation facility where many many Dio clones are tested for genetic engineering. I have never worked with a species with such a ridiculously high power ceiling and tendency towards magical mutation. It was impossible to know whether or not replacing specific segments of my genetic code with seemingly superior segments will result in an overall decrease in performance metrics in the long run.
Fortunately, my better baby momma has Temporal magic and doesn't ask questions, so my testing is going great.
Currently things look like I can augment my healing factor and immune system without any issues, and the homunculi are stable even when testing the combined traits I had engineered from memories of my former DNA megastructure back when I was the God Emperor of Krogankind.
Krogan, Hutt, Argonian, Locust, and X-Gene Human (Sabertooth) all seemed to play ball with the Dio clones, creating a healing factor that can nearly match the Phenex Clan's 'Immortality'. Being able to bounce back from having eighty percent of my brain destroyed was a major yes please on my wish list.
That alongside major improvements to various biological resistances, adaptive damage mutation, and improvements to received healing were all promising vectors of research for me.
Devils were without a doubt the (potentially) toughest, strongest, fastest, and most sensitive race I'd ever encountered, but in the healing factor and immunities category things get fucky and never seem to improve. On the plus side, diluting the Devil DNA comes with a nice increased resistance to the Holy damage type. Not enough to overcome the inherent type advantage but definitely a major improvement to the debuff suffered on exposure.
The silence at the table stretched into the uncomfortable as Rias and my parents looked at me, but jokes on them. I live for the awkward silences and try to work them into my conversations with people as much as I can.
I poured my self another cup of wine while they waited for the reveal of my super nefarious basement activities and I kept them waiting until it was time to leave.
"Mother, Father, Rias." I put a low heat growl into that last name, "It has been a lovely evening. The loveliest in recent memory, but it is well enough time to go. After all, they say nothing good goes on after 10 PM and as a true hellion I need to get out on the street so I don't miss anything salacious, stimulating, and or tantalizing."
I stood to leave and made it to the front door when a pair of hands seized me from behind.
"Wait!" Rias huffed having had to run to gather her things and get to me before I teleported away on the front porch.
"Care to join me in the festivities?" I proposed to my pregnant fiancé.
"You didn't answer back there." she inquired.
"Indeed, I did not." I nodded my head.
Rias bit back whatever response she initially came up with and instead put on a pleasant smile, "What are we doing tonight?"
"Cockfighting." I grinned and ported us to the front gate of the cockpit.
We entered at the top floor of a stadium dug into the earth, a massive pit of sand with a crowd of screaming fans just baying for the next round of bloodsport.
"Are all these people here really here to watch chickens fight?" Rias was shocked by the huge crowd as I led us to my private box.
I whipped up a couple of cocktails that would ensure proper nutrition throughout a period of roughly twelve hours and sat down in a comfy seat.
"Chickens?" I grinned as I heard the rattling chains of the coming combatants, "Nothing so pedestrian, my dear."
Rias gasped as two pissed off cockatrices charged out onto the sand, their massive disfigured quadrupedal forms covered in black feathers and bad intentions in their evil hearts.
The memelord part of me couldn't help myself.
"Now this is cockfighting."