Disclaimer: I don't own Highschool DxD.
Here I Come
"Hm, Joshua?" Jeanne called out once they were back and Joshua looked away from the fridge, where he had started to set some purchases he had made on the way back. He gave her a nod indicating that he was paying attention. "Who is… Morag?" She asked and he blinked. "You mentioned her in the shopping mall, remember?"
"I did, yeah. Can't believe I forgot to introduce you to her," He shook his head and turned to Cheshire, who let out a meow that sounded particularly mocking to his ears. "Laugh it up," He snapped without any heat in his voice. "Well, no time like the present, follow me," He told Jeanne as he made his way to the study.
Once he reached the desk, he paused for a second, gulping down his nervousness as he decided to do something in particular. Resting his hand on the edge of the desk, he curled his fingers and pressed them on the underside. As he remained silent, he felt Cheshire press her head against his calf.
"Well, Morag," He called, with more confidence in his voice than he felt. "Why don't you come and say hi to Jeanne? She'll be staying with us for the foreseeable future," He informed the arachnid, turning to a very confused blonde. Her expression was amusing, but not enough to distract him from what he was setting himself up for.
"Hmm, Joshua?" Jeanne mumbled when nothing happened for a moment, clearly not sure if something should be happening. A second later, the man felt the spider's little legs start walking on his hand, as he had predicted he would. He would admit though, that he hadn't been 100% sure the arachnid would follow his unspoken command, or if she would even be smart enough to understand it.
Joshua wasn't thinking about that though. Not when his mind conjured the memory of the night he first met Morag and later Nagini. The night where that little black spider had been a moment away from being the instrument to his death.
He had later read about Black Widows and found that, surprisingly enough, they weren't really all that deadly. However, Joshua was sure that was just because most people would recieve treatment after a bite. And with the Hunter there, he wouldn't have received any type of help, he would probably have gotten the opposite, actually. And that would, he was sure, lead to a very slow and painful death.
All that hadn't helped him gain any sort of reassurance when it came to relaxing around Morag, even if now he was sure he would survive one of her bites.
Joshua had, however, been thinking about actually trying to get closer to his third Bond. This was his first try, and he was unsure if it was the right moment. Maybe he should have waited until he was by himself. 'Too late for that,' He thought as he felt Morag walking around his wrist and heard Jeanne gasp once she saw the spider appear.
Slowly, he pulled his arm up to give her a better view.
"This is Morag," Joshua introduced, not daring to move much with the spider on him. He was grateful for Cheshire's calming presence as the cat continued rubbing herself between his legs. "Morag, this is Jeanne. Say hi," He added jokingly, only to blink, surprised, as he saw the spider raise her front pair of legs, as if she was waving at Jeanne with both 'hands'.
[Bond: Morag has gone up a level.]
"So… is what you meant with spiders, huh? I had hoped it would be just the old apartment or something..." Jeanne mumbled, eyeing the arachnid warily. Joshua didn't blame her, he was still wary of Morag and he was the one that had a Bond with her.
"I'll admit," He replied, forcing his voice to come out as casual as possible, if only to reassure the girl a little. "That I'm surprised you haven't run for the hills yet, what with Nagini and now Morag. I know they are kind of scary."
"They are," The teenager confirmed, her blue eyes still locked on the spider. Then, she gulped before speaking once more. "But the voices are quiet… they've never been when I'm close to danger, even this one time that I went to the zoo and was safely away from the animals. They kept whispering warnings every now and then, but… they are silent right now."
Joshua simply hummed, adding that to his limited knowledge of the voices.
"I just… I won't wake up with one of them next to me, will I?" She asked nervously, making the man chuckle.
"No, Nagini usually does that with me, but you are safe. And Morag usually stays under the desk, so you are good on that side too," Joshua reassured her with a small smile. His eyes turned towards the spider currently pacing on his arm. Slowly, he relaxed as he watched her walk back and forth over his forearm, eventually deciding to go to his hand. "Speaking of, I'll go out in a bit to get you a bed. Fortunately, I don't have to buy one, so my wallet won't suffer even more. Maybe I'll get you some other stuff. Something you would like?"
"Eh… if it's not much trouble...?" She trailed off looking slightly down as her foot poked the floor.
"I can't promise I'll get everything, but if it's within my power I will," He offered as a response. He was planning on raiding the Hunter's house for things for Jeanne's room. He was pretty sure that he wouldn't have much that a teenage girl would want, but he would look anyway. Which is more…
"A wardrobe would be nice… maybe a desk?" She added, her eyes darting to his, and he could almost see her dreading using it after he told her Morag lived under it. "That would be it, I think... A nightstand?"
Joshua smiled wryly as she told him her 'list' of wants. He had expected it to be humble, but he still thought there would be a few more things in there. 'Guess I'll see if I can find anything else myself,' He mused as his eyes turned back to Morag once more.
"I can get that, I'm pretty sure," He told the girl. "I'll see about finding some more things."
"Thanks," He couldn't help but return the wide, beaming grin that she sent his way with a small smile of his own. Maybe having her around wouldn't be so bad.
[}-o-{]
"How do you understand any of this?" Joshua looked up from his book at Jeanne's question. At that moment, both of them sat at the dining table, him having moved his books from his study so that they could both read together. He hadn't, after all, seen any reason to hide his books on the supernatural from the girl. If the voices were really… well, real then it was better for her to have as much information as possible. Nevermind the fact that the last thing Joshua wanted in his conscience was something happening to Jeanne because he hadn't informed her as much as possible.
Currently, however, the blonde seemed to be absolutely stumped by the book on… He narrowed his eyes, trying to read the cover. One of his books on warding theory, he was pretty sure.
"I mean," Joshua started with a shrug. "They are kind of complicated and abstract, but after some studying they kind of make sense. Did you start from the easy ones?"
"I think? They weren't very easy though," The girl pouted and he rolled his eyes. Making his neck crack, the man stood up, only getting a slight squeeze from Nagini who sat wrapped over his shoulders.
Walking around the table, he took a look at the teenager's piles of books, checking that they were, indeed, what he had used to get started. 'Odd, why would she think this is that difficult?' He wondered, considering what to do. In the end, he sighed and sat next to her.
"What don't you understand then?" He asked, nodding towards the tomes.
"I just… I get lost in all the factors that have to be taken into account," She mumbled defeatedly. Her fingers clutched the book while her eyes seemed to try and burn a hole through the thing.
"It makes sense, doesn't it? Wards can affect a pretty wide area, and everything inside has some kind of energy that would affect it in some way. That's why one has to consider everything that will be inside. Like, if it's a forest, or a shore, or a desert. Will there be many people inside regularly? Do they have low magic levels or high ones? Are they from any particular species? After all, some of them are more magically attuned or magically resistant and that might mess up with the ward. There's also the fact that some random insect or animal might..."
Joshua trailed off at the lost look on Jeanne and sighed.
"I just… I get it… kind of," She said once he stopped talking, losing confidence as she went on. "But I can't get the right values for all that? How am I supposed to determine the number that should be applied for a highly dense forest? What even is the difference between highly dense and just dense?" She asked, looking like she was a step away from tearing her hair out.
"Well, that's… I think it's explained in one of these," He mused, picking up a few. "Yeah, this one," Joshua nodded as he held up the correct tome. "It explains pretty well how to know those things."
The man blinked when he received no thanks or any other positive answer. Instead, Jeanne looked absolutely defeated. He raised an eyebrow.
"I've already read that one..." The girl mumbled, looking away from him. "It just… it doesn't make any sense to me. Any of these," She all but whined as her hands signaled the entire collection of books.
"I don't know what to tell you, Jeanne," Joshua said, grimacing all the while. Internally, he cursed his social ineptitude. Was he supposed to keep encouraging her? Comfort her?
"Doesn't matter," The girl replied, slumping down. "I guess magic is not my thing." After those words, she rested her elbow on the table, putting her cheek on her hand and picking at one book in particular as she spoke again. "Maybe I'll be lucky and I'll have a Sacred Gear."
"A what?" Joshua asked, his voice giving away his confusion as he tilted his head.
"A Sacred Gear, haven't you read this one yet?" She asked, pulling on the book she had been poking and showing it to him. 'Artifacts of God I,' The cover read. "They are, supposedly, God's literal gift to humans. Some of us may be born with one of these artifacts and manifest it through our lives. Once a holder dies, the artifact is 'sent'," She explained, making the '' with her fingers. "to another newborn being with human blood in them."
"Sounds pretty cool," Joshua admitted, taking the book that she offered him and skimming over the first few pages. Just the first thing he read about, which seemed to be considered a 'Low Tier Sacred Gear' doubled the user's power for a certain time. Which was pretty damn insane if anyone asked him. "Really cool, actually. But what are the chances of that?" He asked the girl, only receiving a shrug as her expression remained dejected.
"I don't know?" She muttered, looking down. "The book says it's not very common, and I believe it. The supernatural wouldn't remain very hidden if everyone had a Sacred Gear… but I have the voices right? I'm not nor… mal..." She trailed off and her eyes unfocused. 'The voices?' Joshua wondered.
The man took that moment of distraction from his companion to wonder about those voices. He was still pretty sure they were the real deal, and that they were somehow related to the weird glowy screen that he had seen when he met Jeanne. They also made for a curious tool to have, although they hadn't proved very useful so far. Hell, this was the first time that week that he had seen Jeanne do that, which meant that they didn't speak very often, or at all.
On the topic of the screen though, Joshua still had no idea what the real requirements for that Quest were. After all, he had picked up Jeanne, he had given her a place to stay, food and clothes, he was even kind of teaching her about the supernatural, even if it was more like learning with her. And still, the Quest remained uncompleted.
"Did the voices say anything?" He asked, as the girl's blue eyes regained their focus on reality.
"I don't know," She frowned, looking at nowhere in particular with a scowl on his face. "They said something about holy creation and blades and power gifted from the past… I'm not sure what all that was about."
"Well, they said that right after we talked about Sacred Gears, maybe they are giving you clues?" He guessed, unsure. It wasn't even like he was lying to her to cheer her up. Joshua really thought that might be a possibility. However, his knowledge on Jeanne's voices was next to non-existent, so he didn't have much to base his theories on.
"You think so?" The girl asked, turning a hopeful expression towards him and making him curse his mouth for not remaining shut. Now he would feel awful if she found that she didn't have a Sacred Gear. "No, you are right!" She replied to herself, turning towards the book with a determined expression and all but tearing it out of Joshua's hands as she started reading.
The man watched the teenager for a moment with an awkward smile before his gaze moved to the serpent on his shoulders. Nagini gave him her equivalent of a shrug, giving her head a curt wiggle and he shrugged right after her. At least Jeanne wasn't depressed anymore.
'Still,' Joshua thought, his eyes narrowing as he moved back to his seat. 'Sacred Gears… That sounds like something that would play an important part in a story...' He made a mental note to take a look through the book to see if it stirred something in his memory. 'Why do I feel like I should remember something? Kind of like with the Khaos thing back in the Hunter's house...' With a sigh, he focused back on his book.
It was, predictably enough, a book about Wards. Detection Wards, to be exact. The whole thing was about that, actually, which was what had initially got Joshua's attention. After all, most of the books he had seen so far either detailed several of them or went on a tangent regarding some general aspects of warding. But a book that was actually all about one ward? And one as thick as this one? That was a first and he had to see the reason for that.
As it turned out, Detection Wards could be used with a variety of purposes. The first was the obvious one, of course, to detect if something or someone entered the perimeter of the ward. Then came the ones he had expected a bit less, like monitoring where inside the ward something or someone was, or seeing how something or someone inside was. They could even detect certain specific or not-so-specific spells being cast inside or targeting the inside of the ward. Those were just a few uses he had found so far.
Joshua was particularly curious about the function he had found that tied the Ward to the caster or even someone else, being able to show them in the shape of a circle and display for them if something happened. Some even involved the tied person being able to call on the ward's circle to show the current state of it. Joshua would admit that a part of him was curious to see if that would be applied into a System screen like the Storage Spell had been or not, but that didn't mean that he wasn't interested in the Ward per se, because he certainly was.
Call him paranoid, but Joshua very much wanted to be aware if someone was inside his apartment and, once he really started thinking about it, inside the Hunter's house. He had, so far, assumed that the crazy bastard had been a lonely son of a bitch without friends, but, if in some sort of twisted mockery of life he did have like minded people around him, Joshua wanted to know. Especially having been at the place several times, the last thing he wanted was someone going there and somehow following some trail Joshua was unaware of towards his home.
For that matter, he could ward the area in the forest where he trained. He was already regularly casting a barely powered Concealing Ward over there to train the spell. He could add that to his practice. It would leave him even more tired than he normally started, but that just meant that he would go straight into Meditation practice after casting both wards.
'Chore as it is to study wards, they are pretty interesting,' Joshua had to acknowledge as a small smile spread over his face. Maybe it was because he had already gotten used to it, or maybe it was because he enjoyed coming up with ways to use his spells, or maybe it was just that wards were the only real type of magic he had access to, spatial not counting since he only had one spell for that one. Regardless of any of that, he was quickly coming to enjoy both learning about it and putting it into practice.
'Now, if I could use it in a fight that would be great,' He thought wryly. Wards were a great way to avoid a fight, which Joshua was all for, if he was honest. However, there was no denying that they were also next to useless when the confrontation was inevitable. 'Or… are they?' Joshua paused as the gears in his mind started turning.
[}-o-{]
"You do this… every day?" Jeanne asked and Joshua had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. The girl always said the same thing after running through the forest during his workouts. He didn't say anything to her complaining since, at first, he understood and, once a week had passed, he just accepted it as part of his routine. If the teenager still came with him, then she didn't really have a problem with the exercise.
"Less complaining more working," He replied instead, a small half-smile on his face as Jeanne whined loudly. "What'll you do today? Meditation or target practice?" He asked, pulling out the revolver. The girl, herself, looked at the gun with wary eyes.
"I still don't get why you practice with that… or the knives for that matter," She voiced and he hesitated for a moment. Joshua didn't precisely want to hide his encounter with the Hunter… but he still didn't want to just… spill all that on Jeanne either. He was saved from having to answer though, because as he opened his mouth, to say what even he didn't know, her eyes unfocused.
'The voices again, huh?' Joshua recognized. It was the second time it happened now, or at least the second time he was aware of. It was also still weird to witness, if he was honest.
"What… What is that supposed to mean?" Jeanne asked out loud, although she didn't look at him. When she turned, she was met with a raised eyebrow from her older companion. "They said something about monsters and hunters lurking around all the time," She explained and Joshua tensed up.
"They are not wrong," He nodded slowly. "I've seen some dangerous stuff and I've only been aware of this side of the world for like… a few months now."
"Really? What did you see?" The girl asked, curious and eager to learn. Joshua, for his part, grimaced.
"I met another magician… he was fond of hunting other magicians," He explained, keeping it short and simple. The last thing he wanted to do was go into detail about that story. However, he also couldn't just hide that from Jeanne, the girl needed to know the kind of stuff that she could find herself against. Especially since she seemed adamant in diving head first into that world and abandoning the mundane one.
"Hunting... " She said slowly, as if she couldn't understand what he was referring to. After a second and maybe a look at his grim expression, her face paled and her eyes flew wide open. "You don't mean-"
"I want to be prepared if there's a next time," Joshua replied, cutting her off as he gripped the revolver in his hand. 'When, not if,' He corrected in his mind. After all, he knew the odds of finding himself against something bad were higher than he would have liked them to be.
"Hm… I'll… I think I'll meditate. The book said it's a common way to awaken Sacred Gears anyway..." Jeanne's voice reached him weakly, not at all like the bubbly personality he had found to be her normal one. Still, it made sense to him that she would so usually devolve into that hesitant and afraid mindset. He would have been too, if he had run away by himself and found himself facing a completely different world than what he knew.
'I would know,' He thought wryly as he started setting a Soundproofing Ward so that he wouldn't disturb the girl's exercise. 'I'm going through the same thing, after all,' He added, thinking about how he had woken up in that hotel bathroom.
"Joshua?" He heard Jeanne call out and he turned to face her. He expected to see her still hesitant, or afraid. He expected her to maybe tell him that she would go back to the apartment, having lost her determination after that rather off-putting conversation. However, what he found was a smile. Small, but resolute. "Thank you… for taking me in… I know it isn't easy for you… and also, for helping me with… all this stuff."
"Don't worry," He tried to reassure her, but it was his turn to be cut off.
"No… I know that it's a lot of trouble for you to take me in," She told him, frowning and pouting. "So… thank you, for still helping me."
"Don't mention it," He nodded, a smile on his face as she relaxed.
"Still," She continued, and he turned towards her once more. "I would like to help out. Since I'm not going to school… Do you think I could get a job?" She asked, all her determination leaving her as she went back to nervous teenager mode.
'Why did she have to ask me though? It's not like I can actually tell her not to do something,' Joshua thought to himself.
"Sure. I can ask Peter if he would like to hire my 'cousin'," The man replied, making the '' with his fingers, drawing a grin from the girl herself. "And if not we can ask around. I found a job a lot easier than one would think, honestly."
"Great," Jeanne nodded, still beaming.
That was a relief, if Joshua was honest with himself. He could support them both with his job at the cafe, especially since he was starting to get more and more tips, probably due to his increasingly high Cooking level. It was, however, still a difficult enough situation that had him thinking how to resolve it. Jeanne deciding to help out was certainly a welcome solution.
"We haven't seen either of you around here. Are you new?" Joshua tensed and turned towards the new voice in the clearing in the forest.
His hand, still holding the revolver, tightening its grip. The other moved quickly towards his back pocket where his cards sat at the ready. Not only was this person coming out of nowhere in the middle of a forest but they had also found them inside a Concealing Ward. They were, at the very least, supernaturally aware, that much Joshua knew.
His eyes found three people. One big, hulking man with an armour piece covering his chest. Another man, average in height and wearing robes. And the last one with a bow, arrow already placed and string drawn, pointing straight at him.
"It's not very nice, to come into someone else's territory without even saying hi," The robbed man continued speaking. Joshua had to hold back a grimace as the voice instantly reminded him of the Hunter. That same fake, amused tone that he had been mocked with. "We are from Khaos Brigade, by the way, nice to meet you."
[} Chapter End {]