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The Forest of the Familiars was exactly as fiction had described it: an immense ecosystem, permanently bathed in the light of a gigantic full moon, with twisted trees, mystical fog, and creatures that defied all human biological logic.
Zatouji walked at the front of the group, sweating profusely and turning his head every ten seconds to make sure that the "guide-eating dinosaur" had not reappeared.
Behind him, the two noble families walked together in an uneasy but peaceful truce. Issei Hyoudou looked around, searching for his longed-for dragon (or failing that, something that would dissolve the girls' clothes), while Kiba and Koneko remained vigilant. Sona and Rias were quietly discussing the mana stats of the local wildlife.
And in the rearguard, with the same expression of chronic boredom as always, was Yugo Hano.
True to form, the history professor traveled along carrying his peculiar luggage. Ruruko Nimura, the hyperactive Pawn of the Sitri clan, sat on Yugo's shoulders, her legs draped over his neck and clinging to his dark hair.
"Look, Sensei! A bird with two heads!" Ruruko shouted, pointing excitedly towards the trees, using it as a mobile observation tower.
"Don't look him in the eyes or he'll eat your soul, goblin," Yugo replied apathetically, making up a fact just to shut him up.
Beneath his right arm, hanging upside down like a sack of potatoes dressed in the academy's gym uniform, was Raynare. The former leader of the Fallen Angels didn't even kick anymore; she had accepted her fate with a resignation bordering on clinical depression.
"I have a cramp in my back, human... I mean, boss," Raynare complained, her voice muffled by her black hair sweeping the forest floor. "And there's a magical bug crawling up my leg. Get it off me."
—I'll deduct 100 yen for complaining outside of working hours—was Yugo's only response.
Asia, who was walking a couple of steps ahead of him with Akeno, turned to look at him with a sweet smile. "Yugo-san, aren't you going to look for a familiar? They say there are some very useful creatures."
Yugo adjusted his glasses with his left hand, as his right hand was busy holding Raynare's legs.
"Asia, I have a genetic catalog of world-destroying alien beings on my wrist. If I need something that flies, I transform. If I need something that tracks, I transform. Getting a magical fire-breathing dog is redundant and would only mean more mouths to feed at the shop. I came because I'm Sona's escort, nothing more."
Akeno let out a soft, crystalline laugh, slowing her pace slightly to walk closer to him. Her violet eyes sparkled with the shared secret.
"Ara, ara, don't be such a spoilsport... Jose," Akeno whispered, making sure the forest music drowned out her voice for everyone else. "Maybe you'll find something cute that matches your grumpy villain aura."
Yugo simply gave him a flat look, although the corner of his lips trembled, threatening to form a smile.
The expedition continued for another half hour. Zatouji led them to a clearing illuminated by moonlight, surrounded by rocks covered in luminescent moss.
"Attention, young demons!" Zatouji announced, regaining some of his professional enthusiasm. "This clearing is famous for harboring highly intelligent familiars! They are docile-looking creatures, but with a great aptitude for magical contracts. Look over there!"
From among the bushes, various creatures began to emerge, drawn by the demons' auras. There were small foxes with luminous horns, three-eyed owls, and tiny earth elementals.
Yugo watched the scene with boredom, holding Raynare (who had fallen asleep hanging on) and supporting Ruruko, who was hopping around on his shoulders.
But then, something moved in the dark undergrowth in front of Yugo.
A creature with black and white fur, twisted horns, and a goat's beard emerged into the clearing. It was a goat. A simple mountain goat, or at least that's what it seemed to the human world.
Yugo looked at her. His gray wells showed no emotion. She was a goat. She had evaporated fallen angels; she wasn't going to care about the livestock of the underworld.
The goat stopped in front of the group. It looked at Issei. It looked at Rias. And then, its rectangular, unnatural pupils fixed directly on Yugo.
Slowly, with a creaking of bones that defied all of caprine anatomy, the goat straightened up. Its front legs lifted from the grass. Its spine lengthened.
The goat stood up, balancing perfectly on its two hind legs, adopting an upright and alarmingly human-like posture.
Silence fell over Yugo Hano.
The history professor's mind, that cold, calculating supercomputer that planned the deaths of high-class demons in fifteen moves, suffered a catastrophic short circuit. His hard drive rebooted, and the operating system "Hano-sensei, the Demon of Discipline" crashed.
Instead, "Jose" emerged, the twenty-one-year-old Latino youth.
Their blood, their cultural DNA, their roots deeply marked by the folklore of their ancient world, reacted with the force of a primal trauma.
The young man, who was now a reincarnated demon, living with a clan of devils, working for the Underworld itself, completely forgot all the lore of High School DxD.
The goat was staring at him, walking on two legs.
The voices from his childhood began to echo in his head at a deafening speed.
"My son, if you ever go to the mountain at night and see a goat walking on two legs, don't ask questions, just say the Lord's Prayer and run, because that's the Devil himself," his grandmother's voice echoed in a gloomy tone as she stirred the soup pot.
"That's witchcraft, son. Goats don't stop. If one stops, it's the goat-legged one coming to take you to hell," he heard the voice of his drunk uncle, crossing himself with a beer in his hand.
"Oh my God, the blood of Christ has power..." murmured the memory of the religious neighbor from her old neighborhood.
A cold, icy sweat, colder than Big Chill's breath, beaded on Yugo's forehead. His pupils dilated to their limit. His knees began to tremble like jelly. Cosmic terror, alienation, and Battojutsu were all useless against the inherited cultural terror.
"Yugo-san?" Asia asked, noticing that the professor was paler than a blank sheet of paper.
The goat, maintaining its perfect bipedal posture, took two steps forward. It opened its snout. Its lips seemed to curl into a macabre smile.
"Meeeeeehhh..." bleated the goat. And then, in a deep, hoarse, and eerily human voice, it spoke: "Do you have any salt, strangers?"
That was the trigger.
Jose's mind broke. The thread of sanity was severed by a pair of rusty scissors.
—THE BLOOD OF CHRIST HAS POWER!—Yugo roared, with a sharp, heart-rending cry full of the purest Latin panic, a language that no one in the clearing understood.
In a single reflex movement, his arms suddenly opened.
¡Thump!
Raynare fell face-first into the luminous moss, waking up abruptly with an indignant groan.
Catapult!
Ruruko, who was sitting peacefully on his shoulders, lost her balance and flew backwards, landing on a bush with her legs in the air.
Yugo didn't even look back. He turned around, planted his feet firmly on the ground, and the brute force of his newly acquired demon body (combined with extreme terror) activated at full power.
¡SWOOOOOSH!
He took off running in the opposite direction with a speed that would have made XLR8 envious. He left a furrow in the ground, raising a cloud of dry leaves, magic dust, and stray feathers. His shouts ("AVE MARIA PURÍSIMA! EL PATAS DE CABRA!") faded into the distance, echoing through the trees of the Forest of the Familiars until they disappeared completely in less than three seconds.
The clearing was plunged into the most absolute silence in the history of the Underworld.
Zatouji blinked. The bipedal goat blinked.
Sona Sitri, the tactical genius, stood with her mouth slightly open, her glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. Rias Gremory was blinking rapidly, trying to process whether she had just witnessed the most destructive anomaly in her territory fleeing screaming from a mere talking goat.
Issei, who was still terrified of Yugo, scratched his head. "Buchou... The strict teacher who almost killed me with his glare... just ran away in terror from a goat?"
Akeno, covering her mouth with both hands, was red-faced from the superhuman effort of not bursting into laughter. She knew his name, she knew he was a foreigner... and she had just witnessed the most hilarious culture clash of her life.
On the floor of the clearing, Raynare spat a leaf of moss from her mouth, half sitting up, completely disoriented.
"What...? Where's the manager?" stammered the former leader of the fallen, rubbing her nose.
Ruruko emerged from the bush, a few magical leaves tangled in her brown hair, looking in the direction the professor had fled.
"Sensei is super fast!" Ruruko exclaimed, dusting herself off. "He threw me around like trash, but his speed is incredible! Kaichou, where did he go?!"
Sona pressed two fingers to her temples, feeling the migraine return with a vengeance. The "emotionless monster," the man who atomized the fallen without blinking, her fiancé... he had just thrown away his "luggage" and run off because of a superstition.
"Tsubaki..." Sona murmured, her tone a mixture of utter mortification and the resignation of a wife dealing with an irrational husband. "Go find our Peon before he sets the forest on fire to drive away the 'evil spirits.'"
Asia clasped her hands together in worry. "Oh my God! Yugo-san was terrified! We must help him!"
Akeno finally couldn't contain herself and let out a clear, vibrant laugh, leaning on the shoulder of a very confused Rias.
"Ara, ara..." Akeno laughed, wiping away a tear of amusement. "I suppose even the most fearsome monsters are afraid of their grandmother's legends."
Deep in the forest, several kilometers away, a very pale history professor was still running, clutching his watch, swearing on all that was holy that he would never go near the livestock section of the Underworld again for the rest of his immortal life.
...
His lungs were burning, but this time it wasn't from cellular damage or straining the Omnitrix. It was from a pure, simple, and mundane lack of oxygen.
Yugo Hano stopped dead in his tracks, bracing a hand against the bark of a massive, black tree. He bent forward, panting, sweat soaking his white shirt. He had run at a speed that defied his own human-demonic anatomy, tearing through thickets, leaping over roots, and snapping branches with his face for what seemed like miles.
When he finally caught his breath, the silence of the forest hit him, immediately followed by the crushing weight of humiliation.
The history professor slumped back against the tree trunk, sliding down until he was sitting upright in the moss. He brought both hands to his face, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses.
"My God..." he thought, and for the first time in a long time, the thought didn't come from Yugo Hano, but from Jose. "I survived ten years of poverty. I burned a middle-class man alive. I terrorize two of the most powerful clans in this city just by looking at them... And I run away screaming over a damn goat?"
The culture shock had been devastating. Her brain, capable of calculating plasma trajectories and processing the cosmic horror of Zs'Skayr, had no defenses against the folkloric trauma instilled by her Latin American grandmother. Seeing a farm animal stand on its hind legs and ask for salt had triggered a primal panic button in her DNA that no Underworld magic could erase.
"Blood is thicker than water... damn it if it is," Jose muttered into the void, letting out a stifled and pathetic laugh.
He was going to have to go back. He was going to have to face Sona, Rias, Akeno, and his own servants after running away screaming "Goat-Legs." His reputation as the "Demon of Discipline" had just suffered irreparable damage.
Suddenly, a rustling in the nearby undergrowth pulled him out of his existential misery.
The ice mask snapped back into place in a millisecond. Yugo stood up, his left hand instinctively resting on the Omnitrix dial. His gray eyes pierced the darkness of the bushes.
If it was another bipedal goat asking for condiments, he was prepared to use Swampfire to deforest the entire area.
The creaking grew louder. A wet, snorting sound was heard, followed by the sound of branches snapping under considerable weight.
Yugo tensed his muscles. The foliage parted.
From the darkness emerged not a nightmarish beast, nor a demon, nor a dragon.
What emerged into the moonlight was, without a doubt, the creature with the lowest survival instinct that the DxD universe had ever spawned.
It was a hound from the Underworld... or at least, a variant that had gone terribly wrong in the evolutionary line. It looked like a cross between a bulldog and a pug, but the size of a small boar and alarmingly overweight. Its coat was a dull, dusty black. And, true to the mythology of hellhounds, it had three heads.
However, that's where any similarity with the fearsome Cerberus ended.
The three heads had flat faces, full of folds of skin that drooped over their bulging eyes. The head on the left was staring at a glowing firefly, completely cross-eyed. The head on the right had its tongue lolling out, panting loudly and drooling on the grass. And the central head stared at Yugo with an expression of utter emptiness, like the loading screen of a television with no signal.
Yugo lowered his hand from the watch, blinking.
The creature took a step toward him. Its short, stubby legs could barely support its barrel-shaped body. It tripped over a small root, somersaulted with a high-pitched squeal like a rubber pig, and rolled to a stop right at the professor's feet.
Yugo stared at the beast. It emitted a bit of its murderous aura, that same pressure that made demons like Saji tremble with panic and Fallen Angels beg for mercy.
The creature's response was monumental: the central head sneezed, splattering Yugo's shoe with mucus, then rested its chin on the toe of the professor's loafer, and in less than three seconds, all three heads were fast asleep. It began to snore with a rasping, congested sound.
The Kuoh assassin was speechless.
"Zero survival instinct..." Yugo muttered, fascinated by the beast's level of uselessness. "You could literally die if a Street Demon sneezes on you. You're a biological failure."
The head on the left opened one eye, licked Yugo's shoelace, and closed the eye again.
Zatouji had said that familiars chose their masters through aura resonance. What did that say about him? Did his aura, which everyone described as an abyss of terror and death, resonate with a morbidly obese, three-headed pug who just wanted to sleep?
Yugo sighed deeply. He understood the cosmic irony. He had a watch with the most destructive creatures in the galaxy on his wrist; the last thing he needed was a fire-breathing dragon or a majestic griffin that would attract attention or cause havoc in the shop. He needed something useless. Something that would take up space, that wouldn't pose a threat to Asia, and that Sona would approve on the bureaucratic paperwork as her "official relative."
She crouched down and placed a hand on the creature's skin folds. She invoked the small contract circle that Sona had taught her to project hours before coming to the forest.
The seal glowed dimly, linking the harmless beast to the Yoke Pawn piece.
"Cerberus is too big a name for you..." murmured the professor, assessing the round, compact mass of his new classmate. "You will be called 'Tamal'."
The now christened Tamal let out a stereo snort of approval.
Yugo didn't bother to wake him. With moderate effort, he reached under the beast's heavy, soft belly and lifted it off the ground. The hellhound hung limp, its three tongues lolling out, easily weighing about forty kilos of pure fat and laziness.
Settling Tamal under his left arm as if it were an inert sack (a grip he was already tragically accustomed to thanks to Raynare and Kalawarner), Yugo turned towards the clearing where he had left the two nobles.
It was time to go back. He had to face Sona, Rias, and the Thunder Priestess, and somehow convince them that his tactical escape had been a "speed exercise," all while carrying the most depressing creature in the entire Underworld.
"If that damn goat is still there, I'm going to use Fuego and we'll have barbecue for dinner," Yugo warned his sleeping familiar, beginning the long and humiliating walk back.
...
The clearing in the Forest of the Relatives looked like the set of a low-budget horror movie that had just undergone a sudden and violent genre change towards erotic comedy.
The infamous "Clothes-Dissolving Slime"—a creature Issei Hyoudou had attempted to tame with an enthusiasm bordering on religious devotion—now lay reduced to a steaming, inert puddle on the ground. The Gremory Pawn, meanwhile, was sprawled a few feet away, his face buried in the dirt and several steaming bumps on his head, the result of the combined fury of nearly every woman present.
The real problem wasn't the dead monster, but the collateral damage.
The clothing of virtually every member of both noble families was in tatters. Rias Gremory covered her chest and waist with the shreds of her uniform, her face burning with furious redness. Sona Sitri, whose aristocratic dignity was being sustained only by her iron will and her glasses, used the remnants of her jacket to cover herself. Tsubaki, Koneko, Momo, and the others were in similar situations, trying to maintain a semblance of decency amidst the chaos.
Despite the chaos, the main objective of the night had been achieved.
Asia Argento, miraculously protected from the slime by Kiba's intervention, held a small, adorable green lightning dragon (Rassei) in her arms. Saji, awkwardly covering himself, had a scaly snake coiled around his arm. Ruruko, the hyperactive Pawn, stroked a spectral wolf pup that nipped at her fingers. And Raynare, the former leader of the Fallen, had a three-eyed crow perched on her bare shoulder.
The silence in the clearing was broken only by Issei's moans, until a scorching heat began to emanate from the nearby bushes.
The undergrowth rustled. An enormous hand composed of volcanic rock and molten magma emerged from the darkness, grasping a thick branch and reducing it to ash in a millisecond.
Tension returned to the clearing. Everyone got on their guard (as best they could, given their clothing).
From among the bushes emerged the flaming head of the Pyronite colossus. Fire looked around with a paranoia that was completely at odds with his apocalyptic appearance.
"Tell me the truth," the magma monster's deep, crackling voice echoed through the clearing, laden with absolute menace. "Is that talking, bipedal abomination still here? Because I swear on everything holy, if I hear a 'meeeh,' I will incinerate this forest until nothing but molten glass remains."
Sona, sighing heavily and adjusting her glasses with her free hand, shook her head.
—She's gone, Yugo. Zatouji scared her off. You're safe from the local cattle.
The fiery colossus exhaled a cloud of steam that sounded suspiciously like a sigh of relief. The enormous rock hand touched the symbol on its chest.
¡FLASH!
Emerald light shone through the forest. Yugo Hano reverted to his human form. His outfit was intact, though a few dry leaves were tangled in his hair. He adjusted his glasses and calmly walked toward the center of the clearing.
However, he did not come empty-handed.
Yugo stopped in front of the two nobles. With almost religious solemnity, the history professor raised his arms to the light of the giant moon, holding his new familiar in the air, perfectly emulating Rafiki presenting Simba in "The Lion King."
The creature dangling from his hands was, without a doubt, a mistake of nature. It was a hound from the Underworld that resembled a morbidly obese pug, with three flat, wrinkled heads that drooled and stared into space.
"I present to you my family," announced Yugo, his gray, monotonous tone creating a hilarious contrast with his majestic pose. "The head on the left, the cross-eyed one, is called Chicken. The one on the right, the one that won't stop drooling, is Pig. And the one in the center, which seems to be brain dead, is Corn."
Yugo lowered the fifteen-kilo creature of pure fat, which immediately landed on his stomach and fell asleep, snoring with all three nostrils at the same time.
—Together, they form Tamal.
The silence was deafening. Rias blinked, completely bewildered. Saji opened her mouth to make a joke, but remembered her life expectancy and slammed it shut. Sona simply rubbed her temples, deciding that registering a fat, three-headed pug in the Sitri clan's records was going to be the least of her problems.
"It's... very cute, Yugo-san," Asia said, with her infinite kindness trying to find the positive side of the useless beast.
It was then that Yugo's brain, freed from the terror of the talking goat, finally processed the visual information of the environment.
Her gray eyes scanned the clearing. She noticed the shreds of melted fabric on the ground. She noticed Issei, half-dead. And finally, she noticed the women of both clans. They were practically naked, barely covered by scraps of melted clothing, their skin exposed to the moonlight.
The professor remained motionless.
Any other teenager in Kuoh (and especially the brown-haired boy on the floor) would have had a nosebleed or thanked the gods. Yugo, on the other hand, processed the nudity with the same excitement he would use to read a washing machine instruction manual.
Her gaze met Sona's. The President blushed furiously, turning her face away.
Then, his eyes shifted to the Gremory nobility. They lingered a couple of seconds longer than necessary on Akeno Himejima. The Thunder Priestess, covering her breasts with a piece of cloth, didn't look away. Unlike the others, Akeno gave him a flirtatious, intimate smile, brimming with a secret warmth that only Jose could understand.
The corner of Yugo's lips trembled in a micro-gesture of recognition before he forced himself to continue scanning.
Finally, his gaze fell upon Raynare.
The Fallen Angel, now Sitri's Pawn, was in a particularly compromising situation. Her generous figure was barely contained by the remnants of the sports jacket Yugo had forced her to wear. Raynare, embarrassed and expecting the sadistic human to either mock her or blush like a pervert, crossed her arms, grumbling.
"W-What are you looking at, human...?" Raynare hissed, trying to keep her pride intact as she covered herself. "It was that damn slimy bug's fault and that pervert Gremory's. Don't look at me!"
Yugo Hano's expression showed neither lust, nor shame, nor amusement.
It displayed the purest, deepest, and most absolute capitalist fury.
"Raynare!" Yugo roared. His voice didn't ring with murderous intent, it resonated with the pain of an accounting manager. "I bought you that damn tracksuit three days ago at the mall!"
Raynare jumped back, startled by the sudden change in tone. "I-It wasn't my fault! It was the slime!"
"I don't give a damn about the forest's ecology or Hyoudou's perversions!" the teacher yelled, pointing at the tattered rags on the ground with pure indignation. "Do you have any idea how expensive sports uniforms are in the human world?! Do you know how much it hurt my wallet to buy you clothes in your stupid size?!"
All the erotic tension of the scene disintegrated in an instant. Rias and Akeno stared in disbelief. Sona covered her mouth, suppressing a hysterical laugh.
"It wasn't my fault!" Raynare squealed, humiliated by being almost naked and being scolded for ruining clothes like a rebellious teenager.
"I'm going to deduct it from the salary I'm not paying you," Yugo declared, adjusting his glasses with implacable coldness. "And starting tomorrow, you're going to clean the minimarket's bathrooms. With a toothbrush. For free. For a month."
"You're a monster!" whined the former leader of the Grigori, hugging herself.
Yugo simply clicked his tongue, picked up the snoring Tamal from the ground, and tucked him under his arm like a deflated soccer ball.
"Let's go, Sona," said the professor, turning toward the edge of the woods. "This place is full of nudists, monsters who damage textile heritage, and traumatized goats. I've had enough nature for today."
As the Underworld's most lethal Pawn walked towards the trees carrying his fat, three-headed dog, both nobles remained in stunned silence, taking in that the man who could destroy continents was more upset about a clothing bill than having a group of naked demonic beauties in front of him.