Chapter Text
"What do you mean I can't go out, you promised",a shout echoed trough the lab.
"Asher, you still don't have the means to protect yourself and I won't be there all the time with you", a young looking man with straight black hair sigh exasperated and a hand in his forehead trying to diminish the headache that he is having right now. He open his eyes, looking at the 6 years old if front of him. "Before you go out, at least, you should be able to master your fire magic."
"Old man, you can't do this to meee", Asher cries while clutching on his knees to the man's clothes. "I worked really hard in the past flying test."
"And I already told you that I'm not that old", the black haired man tries to sake him off putting a hand on top of the kid's head and pushing him. "At least call me by my name, Mero", he manages to break free from the clutches of the smaller demon and pat his clothes trying to get rid of the creases. "If you really wants to go out better start study now how to do the no verbal magic for <Lafire>", to make a point he produces a little fire on his finger. "You were the one who chose this magic".
The kid gets up from the floor and pouts, crossing his armas while his red scaled tail lashes behind him, "I already can do <Lafire> but what you want me to do is very difficult, most demons at my age wouldn't even know how to cast <Cherusil>", he stomps his feet in tantrum. "Just some high ranked demons know how to do no verbal magic", Asher glares at the scientist.
"Well then practice more, doing a tantrum wont help you", Mero then starts walking away leaving the child there too cold down.
Asher flicks him when he sees that the man turned around, and then goes to the training room.
The room was very big, with a massive window on the ceiling letting natural light come to the room, there were many other things but what interested to the young demon right now were the dummies that were placed in the far corner of the room with a clear separation from the other things in side the room, wouldn't want anybody to be hurt when they enter the room, even if in the lab just lived two demons.
Putting his dark purple hair in a low ponytail, the child decides which poor dummie will be at the receiving end of his fire.
"Eenie, meenie, miny, mo..., you", the kid sings while pointing his finger at the dummies and then when he finish he produces a large flame with a hand <Lafire!>, he throws a fire ball at the dummie number 3, leaving it in flames. He continues like this until he is tired and is sweating, with some on his baby hair clutched to his forehead because of the sweat. Tired he slumps to the dirty floor while recuperating his energy, he looks at the window on the ceiling seeing how it was in a beautiful red and orange and then a bit of dark purple, he stretches his arm upwards to the window with his open palm. "I want to see it..., I want to see the twilight, how the sun goes down in the horizon, the trees, the grass... I want to see it all with my own eyes". He lets his arm fall beside him and closes his eyes the tiredness catching him.
...
Asher wakes up in his bed all cleaned up and on his pijamas, looking around his room, he sees a plate of food on his table, beside it, there was a note-
-Finish your breakfast and come to my office- The best scientist in the Netherworld and the drawing of the number six hand sign.
He puts the note aside and starts eating, he picks up the toast and spread the jam on it, then he eats the devieggs that makes a happy face with the bacon, drinking the hot milk, he doesn't like the orange juice.
Finishing he would change his clothes with his usual white shirt and shorts and brown sandals, he just have the same outfit everyday since he doesn't go out. Then he goes to the bathroom to wash his teeth and face, having done his morning routine, he picks the dirty dish and glass to the kitchen and washes them and putting them aside to dry. Finally, he goes to the scientist office.
When he enters the office, he sees the same disorganized place as always, moving around, cautiously, trying not to step on some maybe important papers that were on the floor. Then he sees Mero working on something, the little devil then tip toes to his soon victim and then... pokes the man's sides, making the adult jump from his seat and letting out a not so manly shout. "Kyaa" the man turns around covering his sides, prepared for another attack, "You know that I don't like when you do that", Mero scowled at the kid that was smiling widely with his arms crossed behind his head.
The scientist gets up from were he was and and opens a drawer, picking up a paper he turns around to face the kid who was looking curiously at the paper on his hand, "I've have been giving it a thought and I think that you can go to the forest since no demon is going to see you there so-", he was interrupted by a gasp from the child.
"No wayyy, really", the kid's eyes have stars on them and you could even see him glowing, and you could even notice how the temperature was hotter, his practice is working really well it seems.
"Yes, and don't interrupt me again", he puts his hand that doesn't have the paper on the child's shoulder to prevent him of jumping around, "As I was saying, -so as you are going to the forest I need you to collect somethings for me, maybe you could practice while you are at it, I'm running out of dummies at this point". He hands the paper and a bag to the kid explaining where to find each thing.
"A'right captain", Asher imitates a salute and runs to the door. Mero goes after him shouting, "Remember!, don't let any demon see you!", he just receives an okey sign from the kid.
"Have fun", the man says as he watch the kid enter the forest from the door of the lab. "Well, time to work", Mero goes inside the lab, the doors closing behind him and making them invisible to anyone who isn't registered, and continues working on what he was doing before Asher interrupted him.
...
The first thing that Asher do is taking his sandals off and feel the grass with his feet walking on it. "Such an strange feeling", in some books it said that walking barefoot on grass was good, he now thinks that who wrote that was just making it up, and then laugh at the people who thought that it was real. He puts his shoes on and starts walking around.
"All the things in this forest are in some tone of red", Asher looks in awe at the forest with his hands on the bag's strap, "If I remember well, I'm in the south of the Netherworld and this forest name is...", the kid taps his temple trying to remember what is the forest called, "It is something with the color red", he ponders at it looking around as if the nature will gave him the answer, then a bulb lights up on his head and he claps, "Yes!, it was 'The Crimson Valley', very fitting name to a place all red".
"Enough geography, let's start this adventure"
The now wild Asher is looking at everything with curiosity, wanting to see how big the forest is, he climbs the biggest tree that's in his view, he could fly to the top but he wanted to try something new. Making it to the top, he stands in a branch, one hand on the trunk. It seemed that the forest doesn't have an end, all he sees in the horizon are red trees, some even taller than the one where he is standing on, and big mountains, looking around he sees a clear, comparing the place with the map that Mero gave him, Asher notice that one of the ingredients is in there.
The kid opens his wings and fly towards the clear, coming closer to there he sees that it was a lake not a clear, he would need to dive to collect some aquatic devislugs.
Asher lands beside the lake, put the bag down and starts taking his clothes off just leaving his underwear on and a jar tied to his waist with some rope that he created from a branch with <Cherusil>, he puts his things on the shadow of a tree. He goes near the water, that is like pink, and tries to see how deep it is. "I can't even see the bottom of the lake", he then cups his hands in the water and drinks some of it, "Tastes like normal water, boring", one would have thought that it would have a strawberry flavor or cherry even.
"The notes said that there was nothing dangerous so I would need to trust them"
He then jumps to the water and dive, inside he waits a second, letting his vision adjust and then he just sees some small fish that were scared by him. He ought to collect the slugs fast he doesn't have unlimited oxygen down here and stars diving to the bottom of the lake, it wasn't so deep after all, it just that the color of the water didn't let him see much.
Reaching the bottom, Asher sees like dark balls with yellow lines across their forms moving around, they were the slugs, he grabs like 5 of them and put them in the jar.
He starts swimming upwards and take a deep breath when he reaches the surface, then swims to the edge of the lake and let himself dry with the sun, he lies down on the grass, face towards the sky seeing the clouds moving. "The world is so big", Asher murmurs to himself, then he picks up the jar with the aquatic slugs to see them better, it was a little gross they were like a mass of black with moving antennas.
After resting a bit, he puts the jar inside the bag and puts his clothes again.
"Let's seee",the six year old demon opens the list of ingredients and draw a tick on the slugs, "I still have so much to collect and explore", with renew vigor he puts everything back inside the bag and opens his red scaled wings, flying to the next product.
It was past noon when he finally has everything on the list, he landed on a clear near, a not at all, terrifying cave and opens the bag to check again that he has all the ingredients.
"First the gross slugs, check", he says as he put the jar beside the bag.
"Then, some rare mushroom that grows on a tree with glowing fuchsia leaves".
"A fruit similar to the dragon fruit but bigger".
"Some large feathers that fell from a bird beast"
"Yes, I got them all", he puts everything back and slumps on the grass, tired, when suddenly his stomach growls. "Gotta hunt now, that asshole didn't put anything to eat in the bag, but he dit put a frying pan and oil." He curse a little, doesn't want to cook with how exhausted he is.
Closing his eyes and concentrates on his sensitive ears, he picks up the sound of rustle just two trees away from he, with great speed he catch the creature off when he is at two feet behind it, he sees that it's a deer, he leaps on it then he murmurs a low "sorry", and kills the poor thing with a fast slash with a wood knife that he made with <Cherusil>.
With great skill he prepares the deer's meat, in the lab he helped Mero dissecting whatever beast that was on the surgical room.
And like in a survival book that he read, he starts a fire with magic, gotta use it if you know how, efficient, then he puts the meat to cook on. Letting down his guard, he relaxes, sitting there while he flips the meat to let it cook on both sides.
What he didn't expect was that a very hungry devil bear, six times bigger than Asher would come because of the smell of meat. But before the bear could lunge at him, the kid makes a stop motion at him and in a goodwill, Asher puts in front of the beast, the rest of the deer that he didn't use for cooking, after all it was too much for a kid his size.
"You're lucky that I'm in a good mood", he flips his meat again on the frying pan.
The bear was perplexed, just who gives up his meal like this?.
"Come on, eat it and don't annoy me", the devil bear does a motion like pointing at it.
"Yes, you", the beast then put its nose close to the dead deer and smells it a bit, and then with its big mouth, taking a bite, and just sits there eating and watching the demon kid serving himself a plate of meat.
And peace reigns again in the small clear on the red forest.
Having his fill, Asher stands up cleaning his mess. After packing his things he gives the demon an ademan, "Bye, let see each other again", with that the kid leaves behind his somewhat friend of a bear and heads to the lab.
...
"I'm back!", the six year old shout when he enters the lab, searching the scientist to give his things.
As usual, Mero is on his office, but this time he heard the child coming and have the time to turn around to face the door just as Asher goes into the room. The scientist was about to greet him but then he saw how dirty the kid was. "How did you get so dirty!, look how are you leaving the floor!", Mero pointed at the young demon and then down to his sandals.
"I had fun", Asher just give him a wide smile.
"You rascal", he gets up from where he is seated towards the dirty kid, grabs the bag to put it on the table and picks the child up, seating him on his arms and goes to the bathroom. "At least you aren't hurt", he pats the child's head.
While Mero is preparing the bath, Asher is leaving his clothes in the laundry basket and telling to the adult about his day.
"It sounds like you had a great adventure"
The child now is seated on the edge of the bath moving his feet since he is still too short to touch the floor, "Yep, and I got to explore so much of the forest, but there are still so many things that I couldn't see".
Mero sumerge the kid inside the bath leaving him to clean himself up, while he picks the basket to the laundry, and comes back with a pair of clean clothes for the child. "Tomorrow you can also go out, but be back before dinner or I would have to drag you back".
"Okeyy"
"Oh, and I left something for you in your bedroom", Mero says as he was about to close the door and then leaves the kid alone as he finished rubbing all the grass and dust from his body, and taking out from his hair some twigs and leaves.
After picking something to eat for dinner, Asher heads to his bedroom seeing that on his bed are new clothes that weren't like his usual pair of white shirt and shorts, and on the floor he sees some boots perfect for going around the forest and black trainers sneakers. And beside the new clothes he sees the magic tool like bracelet that Mero was working this morning. 'The old man really likes me', he thinks with a cheeky smile on his face.
He puts everything in his closet and goes to sleep.
...
The next day, Asher puts on a dark blue sports jacket that has a hood with a white t-shirt underneath, and the black shorts, then finally the sneakers and the magic tool, that he still doesn't knows what it does. With a quick breakfast he goes to the forest, watching out for some magic beast that he can hunt to practice his fire magic.
Right now he is on top of a tree watching a group of chimpanzees just sitting in a circle with a gorila in the center, don't let them confuse you, they are in fact magical beasts, called 'Buffers' that have like a symbiotic relationship, the chimpanzees with their mana will make the gorila bigger and stronger while the gorila is the one attacking and defending for them. In this case, the logical thing to do would be defeating as fast as you can the chimpanzees, so they can't make the gorila stronger. "But I don't want to fight some weak beast", and... here goes Asher doing exactly what you should't do.
The demon child jumps from his tree interrupting the monkeys, making them go to the defensive, the chimpanzees run to the trees to hide but still close enough to give the gorila their mana, and the gorila is in a defensive state until he feels that he is getting stronger. At this moment, one would have already attacked the chimpanzees but Asher is just doing like a pre-fight with the gorila without using all his strength, waiting for the chimpanzees to drain their mana.
The gorila starts glowing with a red light and Asher jumps back seeing the gorila change before his eyes, after it was like two meters tall but now he is exponentially growing bigger til he is as tall as a two plants house crushing the trees with its feet, with that the gorila roars and hits its chest, preparing to attack.
"Good thing that the chimpanzees just pour all of their mana together or else it wouldn't be as interesting", Asher waits for the gorilla to come to him, very confident on himself, as he has his arms crossed over his chest.
Then the beast leaps at him with a punch, Asher dodge it easily, they are like this for a while with the kid just dodging, "Come on, in the book it said that you were difficult to defeat even for a demon ranked Gimel", he stomps the soil and do a high jump towards the gorila's head and kick its forehead, that made the gorila to become irritate and starts throwing puches like a madman, destroying it just got himself tired, noticing that it couldn't even touch Asher, it starts to accumulate mana in his mouth forming a ball of mana ready to fire at him.
Asher conjures a big axe of flames with <Lafire> and when the ball was about to him him, leaping he cut through the mass of mana in the air cutting it in two that explotes behind him. Then when he touch the soil, he leaps again, this time to the gorila that roars at him and in a desperate attempt to hit him, it throws a punch but Asher's axe cut it too and then he kills the gorila.
"I really expected more from this beast", Asher leave the scene letting the flames consume what is left of the gorila.
The hunt continues, and even if some magical beast was problematic and some of them even injured him, he was the winner at the end, "I can cast <Lafire> faster than before but I still need to master it if I want Mero to let me go near other demons", he complained while he was flying on his way back to the lab since it was almost time to dinner.
Suddenly he hears a roar under him, with curiosity he heads there. He recognized the place it was where he met the bear yesterday, it is being attacked by a big bird, it was where the feathers that he collected came from, it was a magical beast that lives in the volcano that's on the east part of the forest, they shouldn't be here, "Maybe it was the heat of my flame that got his attention since I was here hunting all day, I made the temperature here in the forest higher".
Feeling a little sorry for the bear, he decides to help him, "Well gotta be the responsible child that I am and clear this mess".
He close his wings just as he is on top of the bird and conjuring <Lafire> he creates the axe to try to cut the bird but it was useless, his control with the flames deteriorated, he is exhausted because of the others fights and he was still injured on his left shoulder. Good news it wasn't focusing the bear, bad news it was chasing Asher, "I should have called a more responsible adult", he chastise himself as he open his wings again flies in circles around the bird so it doesn't know where to attack him.Thinking that he had an opportunity he tries to attack him again with his fire but as he was about to hit it, the bird dodge, its wings creating a current of wind that makes him land badly beside the bear, the bird prepares to attack again and he tries to move but his right ankle was injured when he landed, it make him wince.
The beast decided to attack just at that moment, he goes in a defensive pose to at least cover his vital points of damage, then in the corner of his eye he sees that the bear it seemed to try to hit the bird throwing rocks at it, one of them landed near him, with an idea he picks up the rock and pours all mana he can conjure first with no verbal <cherusil> he changed it to an axe and then tries to cast <Lafire> on it but just as he was about to cast it the bird in a flash is in front of him, and he closes his eyes, throwing the axe.
When nothing hits him, he opens his eyes and see that the axe was covered in a deep blue flames and is crested on the birds head, exhausted Asher just slumps on the dead grass, surely burned by his flames and lays there as he lost conscience.
...
When he wakes up, he is hit with a very bad headache, but he can see that he is in the nursing all bandaged, so he relax and lets the warmth of the bed and the soft pillows cuddle him to sleep.
It was noon when he opens his eyes again, he can see it thanks to the clock that is on the wall. Then he finally notice Mero seated with his back facing Asher.
The kid calls up to him, and Mero turns around seeing him awake, "How did you now where I was", Asher asks him.
"I dit tell you I would drag you back if you weren't back before dinner", he is still seated with his arms crossed and with his bows furrowed, looking at him reproachful. "And with those blue flames it was very easy finding you".
"Yes!, that, I finally mastered <Lafire>, I can do it without saying it!", he would have jump around the room if a hand hadn't stopped him, but he was energized, so instead he stretch his right arm, the other one is in a cast, and produce a flame on his palm.
"Even if it is great and all", Mero puts out the flame, and lightly bonks the child's head making him wince, "You are still recuperating, that means no magic and training"
Asher pouts slumped on the bed, "You should be praising me, I mastered <Lafire> in a week, knowing the spell for less than a month, you should start calling me a genius", he puffs his chest. "And for how long do I have to be like this", he asked after getting down of his egocentrics ,but very true, thoughts.
"Like a month, your ankle was badly injured", there was a sound behind the door, strange there should be no one else here, Asher looks at the door, but Mero just goes to the door and opening it, "You had made an ally in the forest, he was with you when I found you, trying to protect you even if it was hurt too", from the door enters the bear that he saved, and it leaps at him and he gave him a side hug when he was close enough, the bear put his head on the bed while he sits on the floor.
Mero walks to him at pat Asher's head and give him a soft smile, "Welcome back".
"I'm back", Asher tilts his head up giving him a smile too.