{Author's Note}
THE POWER IS FLOWING THROUGH ME! THE INSPIRATION! THE SCRIPTS! THEY JUST WON'T STOP! IT'S SO GLORIOUS!
By the way, thanks to Niomi on my Discord Server, I now know that as of this chapter, 44 days have passed in-universe. Just over a month, and look at all the chaos Kevin has caused so far! Just imagine the kind of future chaos tat will result from his actions! It's Glorious!
Anyway...DISCORD LINK: https ://dis cord.g g/h5JKH KCBDA
Edit: almost for get with my excitement of getting another chapter out...
0N W17H 7H3 5T0RY!
***
{Inside the Mansion}
To be honest, none of them were surprised when they entered the building and found themselves in a laboratory fit for a stereotypical witch. With a large cauldron in the center, walls lined with vials, and various random plants and animal parts laying on every flat surface, it was obvious that whoever lived here wasn't as 'anti-witch' as the rest of the villagers claimed them to be.
The traveling trio all had suspicions that the real reason the Village Lord was throwing shade at everyone else in the village was to cover up her own deeds, and this just confirmed it. However, there was one thing that wasn't adding up at the moment...
"Why is all of this set up in the main entryway?" the Eevee questioned out loud, eyebrows raised. "I mean, I get that the windows are obviously covered to prevent people from seeing whatever horrors are going on in here, but all someone would have to do is open the front door to expose her."
Alice nodded in agreement. "It's ridiculous. Even lowly bandits have enough foresight to at least disguise their main base's main entrance."
"Kevin...should we really rob this woman?" Sylph asked her host, her eyes showing a bit of pity. "Looking at this, I'm pretty sure she suffers from some sort of mental disability, and I don't feel comfortable picking on the disabled."
Before they could continue verbally tearing down the planning power of the Village Lord, a voice sounded from the other side of the room. "I'm right here, you know. I CAN hear you."
Standing behind the cauldron, and sending them a scathing glare, was a woman who obviously loved the color green. Her hair, eyes, elbow-length gloves, and dress with all a deep green that would make her almost invisible in a forest, if not for her pale skin. She also had some gold and red accessories on her head and belt, but they weren't as eye-catching as the sheer overload of GREEN.
"Then, can you answer my question of why you made such an obvious blunder in the layout of your evil lair?" Kevin shot back.
She silently glared at him for a few seconds, before turning her head to the side. "I don't need to explain myself to intruders like you."
"Let me guess: you realized it was a bad idea after you had already put everything in place, but by then it was too late?"
Her lack of response and the slight sagging of her shoulders was all he needed to know he was right. It was a common trope in comedic stories with villains, after all, so he couldn't really criticize her too much for it. Sometimes something seems like a good idea, but only after you see the result do you realize how badly you've fucked up.
Like the time the Eevee boy had taught his dog to bite the ankles of people who annoyed him.
"Insults on your long-term planning skills aside," he continued, ignoring the way her eyes sharpened again. "We're here to talk to you. You are Lily, right?"
It took her a few seconds to recover from the rapid-fire blows to her self esteem, but she eventually straightened up and responded. "Yes, I am Lily, the Lord of this mansion. A sorcerer aiming to understand the truth of all creation."
"Cool. Anyway, we're here because an annoying informant whom I may or may not have tortured half to death told me you've recently come across some things that belong to me. I'm here to either get them back peacefully, or beat YOU half to death and take them forcefully," the boy stated, his expression remaining neutral.
That...was a lot of unexpected information all at once. "So...you're not here for the men and women I've been kidnapping to perform my experiments on?"
"Nah," he shook his head. "As far as I'm concerned, most of the people in this world are stupid enough that they deserve whatever nightmarish torture they find themselves being subjected to. I'm pretty sure you have some actual reason, other than scientific curiosity, to be doing this; so, as long as you haven't been kidnapping actual children, instead of teenagers and up, I have no problem with you."
Lily was honestly at a loss. She'd made plans years ago for what she would say and do should a Hero ever come to her village and try to ruin her scheme. There were traps around her mansion, test subjects who were poised to attack the moment a male came close, and a maze of hallways lined with cells that could be remotely opened to set all of the abominations she'd been creating over the years free.
And yet...all of these machinations were crumbling before her very eyes. Before her stood three beings that, judging by the restrained power she could feel radiating off of them, could each easily turn her into a smear on the ground in a matter of seconds. If it was a human Hero coming through, she felt confident in seducing him, or letting her experiments ravage him, but these powerhouses? If she didn't play her cards right and think on the spot, she could kiss her position, her home, and her life goodbye.
"I won't lie to you and say I haven't taken small children as test subjects," she openly admitted, bowing in apology. "But, I would be willing to let them go, along with whatever items you are asking of me, if you would kindly promise to not kill me."
Kevin's body immediately became tense. As was proven back when he saved a small boy from a harpy in Happiness village, he had a VERY low tolerance for anyone who would dare to defile an innocent kid. Anyone age thirteen and up were okay, as they had already undergone puberty by that point and were pretty much assholes by nature, but children were not to be violated in any way, under any circumstances. Lily didn't know it, but she'd saved her own life by offering to free them, otherwise the teenager would've killed her without a second thought.
Instead of simply accepting her offer, he addressed his companions. "What do you guys think?"
"This is a human matter," Alice shrugged. "It has nothing to do with me, so I won't intervene."
"You...do realize that I'm not a human...right? Thus making this a monster matter as well?" the boy said with an arched eyebrow.
The lamia smirked back at him. "But you were raised around them, thus making you more human than me."
"*sigh* You have a point. What about you, Sylph?"
"I wanna know why she's doing all of this kidnapping," the small Spirit replied with a complicated frown. "Can you add telling her story to the deal?"
Knowing that the moment he refused she was going to do everything in her power to annoy him into agreeing, "Fine," he nodded, before returning his attention to Lily. "I promise not to kill you, with the additional stipulation that you also have to tell us all of your motivations behind the whole operation you have going on here."
Lily let out a sigh of relief. It didn't take a genius to tell that the monster boy wanted to kill her the moment she admitted to experimenting on children. At this point, she'd be willing to concede to any of his demands just to make it out of this situation alive. "Anything to live another day. Please, follow me to my study." With that said, she turned and led the trio through one of the side doors.
Upon walking through, they could see that she'd converted most of the mansion into a giant dungeon. What probably used to be wooden walls were replaced with hard stone, dozens of jail cells lined either side of the hallways with iron bars keeping her prisoners locked inside, and branching corridors were present every few yards, leading to even more cells. To top it all off, the air smelled of sweat and semen, and was filled with the moans of both men and women.
Curiosity got the better of Kevin as they passed by some of the cells. Other than the men being squeezed for all they were worth, the female test subjects were varied. He spotted what looked like masses of tentacles hanging from the ceiling; women who were mostly human, with the main difference being that either one or both of their arms were replaced with multiple tentacles and worm-like appendages; and even an Iron Maiden that opened to pink, pulsing flesh that was obviously meant for digesting its victims whole. All of them were in the midst of feeding on the male prisoners, and thus completely ignored the group being led through the winding halls.
They eventually passed through another door that led into what looked like an extra lab, only this one had books lining shelves instead of potions, and a large desk in place of the cauldron. This was where the woman performed her more study-related research, while her main laboratory was for actual experimentation.
Sitting in the chair behind the desk, she addressed her guests again. "Now, you said something about some items in my possession that belong to you?"
"Yeah," Kevin nodded. "Honestly, I don't know which ones you have, but I can already feel their energy signatures coming from within this desk. If I'm right, there are five of them."
Lily immediately understood what he was referring to. A quick opening of a drawer resulted in her taking out five objects, with four of them resting on tissue paper, while the fifth was sealed in a glass jar. "I'm assuming you mean these? I confiscated them from a merchant passing through before feeding him to my experiments. Even I could feel the power contained within them, so I kept them instead of sending them off to the church like the rest of my guests' possessions."
Having played every Pokemon game since the first generation (even though he deeply regretted generation six), Kevin had no problem matching up the Held Items in front of him with their sprites in the games. They were a Binding Band, an Amulet Coin, a Red Card, a Choice Scarf, and a jar of Black Sludge. The boy practically vibrated with anticipation of what new abilities they could provide for him.
He wordlessly reached his left hand out, and right on cue, the System started speaking.
[Attention Host: Five Held Items have been detected within absorbing range. Would the Host like to assimilate the Held Items into himself to unlock new functions?]
'Yes,' he mentally replied without missing a beat.
Just like with [Angel Halo], [Poseidon's Bell], and the [Ball of Guidance], all five objects immediately started to glow so brightly they were difficult to look at. After a brief second, they simultaneously disintegrated into particles of light that gravitated toward the boy's chest, and then merged with his soul. A few more seconds later, the System revealed the results.
[Congratulations! The Assimilation of the Held Items "Binding Band", "Amulet Coin," "Red Card," "Choice Scarf," and "Black Sludge" was a success!]
[New Perks Unlocked: Enhanced Binding, Miraculous Money, Time Out, Keep Hitting, and Toxic Healing]
[New Evolution Added: Toxeon.]
In a rare show of emotion, Kevin started grinning widely. No matter how many times Alice saw the teenager smile like this upon absorbing an artifact, it was always off-putting. Maybe it was because the smile looked so innocently happy on his childish face, and she couldn't properly process it when the majority of the time he looked like he would rather be literally anywhere other than his current location?
Oblivious to his friend's speculations, Kevin didn't hesitate to check out the new Perks section of his Settings. Sure, the new form that was obviously unlocked by the Black Sludge was cool, but he had a burning desire to know what kind of boons he was being given.
He wasn't disappointed.
[Enhanced Binding (Binding Band) - Increases the duration of any Binding attacks/Moves used by the Host. Warning: DOES NOT affect duration of Sealing on targets.]
[Miraculous Money (Amulet Coin) - At the end of any physical confrontation/battle, the Eeveelution System will reward the host with an amount of Gold determined by the power level of the enemy.]
[Time Out (Red Card) - Once per week, the Host may select an entity at or below the Host's power level and remove all offensive and defensive abilities from them for one hour. This includes Active and Passive abilities, as well as knowledge of combat tactics.]
[Keep Hitting (Choice Scarf) - Steadily increases the Host's speed when using the same Move multiple times in a row.]
[Toxic Healing (Black Sludge) - When using the Toxeon evolution, the Host will be healed by 6.25% of his full health every five minutes.]
'Woooooaaaaaah,' Sylph thought, also looking at the screen. 'A new evolution and the power to make money out of nowhere !? That's so cool!'
Kevin nodded. 'Yeah,' he mentally agreed. 'I can finally stop relying on Alice to pay for everything.'
While they were having their mental back and forth, Lily was busy staring at the place where the objects had previously rested on the desk. Hours of experimentation had led her to conclude that they were indestructible. Despite sensing immense potential contained within each, the only one she could actually make use of was the one band that she sometimes slipped around her arm, which made it easier to restrain her more unruly prisoners. But, here was this teenager breaking them down without even touching them and absorbing them!
If she wasn't so invested in making it out of this encounter alive, she may have attempted to capture and run some experiments on him.
It took a few minutes for the boy and his fairy-like tagalong to finish their mental conversation, with Sylph even going so far as to fly around in excitement. Alice remained silent, knowing that he would likely tell her about whatever power-up he received later at lunch or dinner. Revealing all of it in front of an obviously-evil woman wasn't a good idea, after all.
After finally calming down, the Spirit of Wind prompted the Village Lord to tell her backstory. It was long and dramatic, but could easily be summarized: Her mother was the mistress of the previous Lord of the village, and when Lily was born she was despised as the "daughter of some foreign prostitute." Her mother worked herself to death trying to support her, and when she passed on Lily was forced to move in with her father. After years of being treated like garbage, she had decided to learn dark magic and use it to kill her father and brothers, becoming the new Village Lord.
However, she wasn't satisfied with stopping there. The rest of the village had constantly looked down on her, chastised her, and even threw things at her in the streets. Thus, she made it her goal to make their lives a living hell in retaliation. Men, women, children, and the elderly were all turned into prisoners in her dungeons and test subjects for her experiments, while their relatives on the outside lived in perpetual fear of being the next one to be 'executed.'
"Hm..." Kevin hummed as her story came to an end. "I can see where you're coming from."
Lily's eyes widened in surprise. "You...do?"
"Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't have gone after the children, as they weren't even alive back then, but if I were in your shoes, I'd have tortured every man and woman responsible for making my life miserable," he affirmed. "Hell, I do have people back home that are only still alive because I didn't want to be arrested for slowly removing their limbs until they eventually died of blood loss."
"I...expected you to tell me that what I'm doing is wrong, or that I'm going too far. It's good to see that at least SOMEONE understands my -"
"Oh, you absolutely are taking things too far," the Eevee shot down her assumptions. "I said that it was okay to torture the people responsible, not random people who stop by your village to check it out, or the kids that have nothing to do with your problems. It really should've stopped with the assholes who ruined your childhood, but here you are running experiments on every random yokel that accidentally wanders into your neck of the woods."
Neither Alice nor Sylph were surprised by his statements. He'd long since told them of the motto that was passed down through his mom's side of his family: 'When someone fucks with you, don't get even. Get ahead. Get so far ahead that everyone else is too terrified of what you'll do next time if someone fucks with you again.' It was something that he lived by every day, and was exemplified by his interactions with the various monsters trying to r*pe him.
As for Lily...she was having an internal debate. If he'd just spouted some self-righteous nonsense about showing restraint and forgiveness towards her tormentors, the verdette probably would've just written him off as someone who couldn't possibly understand her pain. But he didn't, and a look into his eyes showed a similar pain to what she had experienced. He obviously knew exactly what he was talking about, and that made her doubt her own convictions.
She'd long since put down the men who threw rocks at her as she'd walked down the streets, and irreversibly mutated the women who'd made snide remarks and refused to sell her new clothes. The old grandpas and grandmas who'd spit on her as she passed had died of a combination of old age and stress, and the current priest in the village's church was actually the third one since her rule began, with the other two serving as sustenance for her more ravenous experiments.
Eventually, she came to the conclusion that she HAD taken things too far. After getting her revenge tenfold, she was now just emptily going through the motions, spurned on by an empty hatred for people who hadn't wronged her. Her experiments and research only served to further the senseless torment of innocent people, with none of it actually furthering her understanding of the world, like she had thought she was doing.
"Oh my god," she mumbled, an expression of horror making its way across her face. "What have I done?"
"You done goofed!" Sylph cheerfully informed her. "But remember, the first step to getting better is admitting that you have a problem!"
Tears fell from the woman's eyes. "Those children...the men and women who've died...I'm a monster."
"Hey! I take exception to that," Alice snapped, momentarily revealing her lamia form before changing back.
"And hey, it could've been worse," Kevin added.
"...how?" Lily asked, not sure how she could have sunken any lower.
The boy smirked. "You could've become a lawyer. From what I've heard, barring some exceptions, they are some of the lowest scum in the universe, and there are literally special places for them to be tortured for all of eternity written into various works of literature and mythology." {A/N: Yes, this is my actual view on Lawyers. Some of you out there might be 'good' ones, but the majority are subhuman filth that deserve to be tormented for some of the shit they've defended guilty people for. Same for Politicians.Fucking Fight Me.}
Despite only Kevin and Sylph knowing what a lawyer actually was, due to the technological and social state of this world, a collective shiver ran down the spines of all three females. Lily even felt a small spark of relief in her heart that she'd never become something as despicable as whatever this..."lawyer' was.
"I also knew how you can start to make things better," the teenager continued, drawing everyone's attention back to him. "You see, even though your experiments have morphed all of your female prisoners to an unrecoverable level, I actually have an ability that may be able to seal all of those nasty tentacles away and stabilize them."
"Really!?" Lily asked, her eyes filled with hope...before her logical mind caught back up to her. "But you're not going to do it for free, are you?"
He shook his head. "Nope. I need something from you first. More specifically, I need to beat you half to death and show the village your mangled body."
A cold pit formed in the Village Lord's stomach. "What reason could you possibly have for harming me in such a way?"
"Weeeeellllll," Kevin began, obviously a little uncomfortable as well for some reason. "There are three main reasons, the first of which being I've wanted to rip you apart since you admitted to experimenting on kids. I REALLY hate it when people do shit like that.
"Second, is that one of the artifacts I just absorbed rewards me with gold for defeating powerful enemies. I'm not gonna take any money you have to offer me, as it's money earned through the suffering of children, so getting paid for beating the tar out of you is the next best thing."
He refused to say the third and final reason, as even thinking about it made him cringe. After all, how was he supposed to explain that he'd observed every female creature they'd passed on the way in, including Lily herself, and concluded that all of them were Normal/Dark types. With that Typing, and the sheer number of them, it would be best for him to assume a form that was super effective against them. Unfortunately for him, he only had one form that was super effective against Dark Types, and it was...Glitter-Powered Insanity Incarnate.
Being able to hear his thoughts, Sylph was simultaneously excitedly anticipating what would be coming next, and making plans for the inevitable mental and emotional turmoil her 'husband' would be experiencing in the aftermath. She hadn't been around for the Magical Girl incident, but she knew that that particular evolution caused actual psychological damage to Kevin just thinking about it. For him to willingly go through with it...
'Why are you going so far to help her?' she asked in his head.
'Because her heart's in the right spot now, and at least she wants to atone for the shit she's done,' he replied. 'Besides, I'm mainly doing it for the kids. They don't deserve to die or end up as abominations because their parents were horrible people.'
"I understand," Lily nodded, drawing the duo's attention back to the physical world. "I'll probably be imprisoned anyway, so I might as well take the physical punishment that I'm long overdue for."
Kevin nodded, silently praising her for her conviction.
Before he could even begin to reconsider his next steps, the boy immediately reached inside his soul and tugged on the metaphorical string connected to the one evolution that he still didn't want to touch with a five hundred foot pole. A flash of light was triggered, and as the room's other occupants could fully regain their ability to see, a high-pitched voice sounded from where Kevin was standing.
"HI HI! Magical Girl Sylveon is back and ready to KILL SOME MOTHERFUCKERS in the name of friendship, love, and ULTRA-VIOLENCE!"
***
{Author's Note}
So...How many of you got chills reading that last MAGICAL statement from our favorite protagonist? I know I felt a shiver going down my spine from writing it, and I don't know whether it's from dread or anticipation of writing the next chapter.
Anyway, what do you guys think? He now has five held items absorbed into the Eeveelution System, with each giving additional Perks that vary in usability. I will say that starting from the next Region, the Noah Region, Held Items will be showing up more often as well.
Anyway...
DISCORD LINK: https ://dis cord.g g/h5JKH KCBDA
As always, comment on the paragraphs and the chapter itself. Try not to be a dick, memes are appreciated, and correct my grammar so I can fix it for future readers!
See you later!