DxD 0116: Control Training
“Don’t get startled…” Abaddon told Koneko as he brought his palms together before condensing his Demonic energy on the surface of his palms.
Koneko, on the other hand, felt her hair standing on end and her eyes widened as she quickly jumped back from Abaddon, feeling almost terrified when she saw the kind of energy that was within the man. Due to her natural sensitivity to energy, she was usually able to sense the energy of most beings. Only beings far above her power scale were the ones whose energy she couldn’t sense, beings like Sirzechs or Serafall. And strangely, Abaddon had been added to that list since the previous day.
Now she understood the reason for that. She couldn’t fathom the kind of boost that he’d received, but the energy she was feeling from him right now was enough to make her feel a sense of absolute suffocation.
Abaddon’s eyes opened after a few seconds as his hands separated, forming five fine threads of pure crimson Destruction energy that slowly extended as his palms separated. After reaching about three feet of distance between his hands, Abaddon stopped, but the threads continued expanding and spreading outwardly.
Within minutes, the threads had expanded to cover a large section of the room, forming an outline of a blimp-like shape in between them.
“Koneko.” Abaddon’s voice brought Koneko out of her fascinated gaze from those threads, “Stand in the center of those threads.”
“A-are you sure, senpai?” Koneko couldn’t help but ask.
“Just do it.” He said calmly, “I’m in full control of these threads.”
After a moment of hesitation, Koneko stepped through the gap that was formed in between two of the strings and stood in the center of the blimp-like shape.
“Good girl.” He praised her for trusting him, “Now get ready to dodge whatever comes at you.” He said, “And don’t touch the walls, grazing the projectiles is merely going to sting and burn you, but the walls could potentially disintegrate you completely if I mess up.” He told her as Koneko’s eyes widened in fear.
She wanted to run out of the place, but in that instant, she saw those five threads multiplying into ten, then twenty, then forty, and so on. Within moments, she was encased within a large oval spheroid that was composed of nothing but pure crimson energy. The strings didn’t even look like energy and instead seemed like perfect threads to her eyes due to how fine they were. The only reason that she knew that it was energy was that she could feel the violent energy contained in those threads.
Her energy sensing made her sure that Abaddon wasn’t bluffing about the energy in the edges being enough to disintegrate her.
As for Abaddon, he had his eyes closed and was fully concentrated on pouring greater amounts of his energy into the threads while making sure that they would stay perfectly stable without even the tiniest bit of energy leaking. He brought the condensation of the energy in them up to the maximum level that he could handle while keeping absolute control over the structure.
“Koneko…” Abaddon’s voice seemed a tiny bit fatigued to Koneko who thought that it was just an illusion, “Close your eyes and feel the energy. Your eyes are going to deceive you.” He told her. This training’s main purpose was to enhance her sensory ability along with her acrobatics and physique.
“Understood,” Koneko obediently closed her eyes and focused on sensing the energy that she could feel throughout the room. Instead, all she could feel was the energy within the oval spheroid that she was currently trapped in. It was as if she was surrounded by a shining bubble of energy that prevented her from sensing anything outside.
She didn’t let it distract her and focused on the empty areas, ready to dodge whatever came at her. At first, it was a thread that came at her in a horizontal fashion. If she stayed stationary, it would cut her waist horizontally, bisecting her in two. She ducked under the thread as it passed by her. Before she could even get up, she felt a projectile approaching her position, making her jump back from her spot while still crouched.
Just as her foot made contact with the ground, she felt a projectile and a thread approaching her at the same time, she quickly moved to a free area while dicking away from the thread. Just as she landed, the process repeated, with a second projectile added in that she also had to dodge.
As the seconds passed with Koneko utilizing her senses to the maximum limit, she went up to the point of dodging ten simultaneous projectiles at the same time, the eleventh was the one that broke through her impressive agility and grazed her waist, lacerating her tank top and leaving a slight burn at her waist.
As she cried out in pain, she realized that the onslaught wasn’t stopping. She quickly reacted and dodged the attacks up to the tenth before the eleventh grazed her calf this time. She was ready to dodge the twelfth this time but it never showed up. She quickly realized that she had to get through eleven simultaneous attacks perfectly before Abaddon moved to twelve.
As Koneko’s training inside the bubble continued, on the outside, Abaddon was stacking up more and more strings of energy such that he would reach his limit. It was then that he would be able to truly start working on his core control training.
It took him a good fifteen minutes, to form almost forty layers of strings around the cocoon that Koneko was currently being tortured inside. She’d reached the level of dodging 16 projectiles simultaneously and had failed quite a few times at the 17 projectile mark for now.
“Finally…” Abaddon whispered as he completely emptied out his tank into those strings filled with potent Destruction energy. For comparison, a single one of those strings contained almost all of the energy that he had in his tank before having the King piece activated.
Plus, considering that there were thousands of strings comprising the cocoon, his energy capacity had increased by far over a hundred times to accommodate the so-called all-around enhancement. Not to mention, Abaddon hadn’t even gotten to the Black Destruction aspect of his Destruction energy yet. He’d already separated a monstrous amount of it and stored it to be trained later. He wasn’t going to stop at his basic Destruction energy with this training session.
With his energy tank empty, Abaddon started to cycle the energy from one of the threads back into his body. As he took back half of the energy that was within the thread he smiled with narrowed eyes, as if he was going, ‘I knew it!’ Even though it seemed like he was keeping his energy completely contained, that thread had lost 1% of its total energy from what he could gleam. And considering that it was one of the newer threads, he’d lost that energy in no more than a few minutes.
‘Time to get to work…’ He thought to himself as he cycled that energy through his body, converting half of it into Aether while the other half went back into the thread along with the energy that he regenerated within those few seconds. It was enough to saturate the thread once again.
As he felt his Destruction energy cycling through his body he groaned inwardly, ‘Yeah, it’s good that I didn’t get Rias in on this when we were in the dungeon … Poor girl would’ve died.’ Due to his slightly shaky control over his energy, it wasn’t flowing in the most optimal way. It caused Abaddon much more pain than it would have normally while also not being as effective at tempering his body.
Still, though, he continued that process with the next thread, taking back half of its energy, converting half of that half into Aether, and throwing the rest back into the thread along with the energy that he regenerated in that time, saturating the thread once again. This process continued as he formed a state of equilibrium where the energy that was converted into Aether and the lost energy was replenished by his natural recovery while he maintained the threads continuously.
After the first few cycles, he got more efficient and increased the number of threads that he cycled in one go.
Slowly and steadily, he ended up cycling all of his energy through those threads and converted a quarter of the total into Aether.
He was done with all of the threads by the time the hour was up.
Just as he heard the light ding of the timer that he’d previously set, all of that energy disappeared back into his body as Abaddon slumped down on the ground, seeming numb. He might have consistently kept his energy reserves at the peak, but his mental strength had been completely exhausted as he did such a large number of things simultaneously. He was not only cycling the threads and converting them into Aether in the perfect ratios, but he was also maintaining Koneko’s training. Although she’d reached a respectable 20 simultaneous dodges, she had tons of light lacerations all along her body while her clothes had essentially disintegrated. And that was after a large part of those injuries had healed due to her naturally high regeneration.
When she saw that everything was over, she slumped on the ground while heaving.
“Fuck…” Abaddon mumbled as he looked at the ceiling blankly, ‘That’s why I don’t train… I’m working at an efficiency loss of 2% on average… To bring it back down to zero, I’ll at least need 15 days of this annoying training…’ He might have his mental faculties exhausted, but he was still thinking about his training, ‘Not to mention, I have to work with both Black Destruction and Draconic energy… I’ll work with both those things when I’m with Akeno. A mage would work as a better training partner. As for the remaining 15 days with Koneko. I’ll come up with something later.’
It took him a while to get himself back together and when he finally stood up. He looked at Koneko who was still lying on the ground in a half-dead state as her wounds slowly healed and walked toward her.
Uncaring of the leftover scraps of her previous clothes, he gently picked her up in his arms before transferring Aether into her body. As Koneko felt Abaddon cradling her and the comfortable energy that ran through her body and healed her injuries, she let out a cute purr and snuggled closer to Abaddon who’d moved to the resting area and sat on the bench as Koneko pressed her face against his chest.