Disclaimer - I don't own any of the characters appearing in High School DXD or the Anime or the manga whatsoever.
–?--
When he came to, his eyes were blurry, and he was looking at a rather plain looking white ceiling, with a fan that was humming along, clearly near the end of its life. He blinked as he realised something.
It was hot in the room, and he was completely soaked, sweating because of the intense heat. The fan was clearly not working as well as it should. Stumbling out of bed like a zombie, he groaned as he fiddled with the window lock. After a struggle that felt like torture because of the still blurry vision, he finally got the window open and just collapsed on the bed behind him as the cold air from outside hit his body.
His vision still blurry, he tried to rub them to check what was wrong, only for him to pause, his hand still raised mid air. His entire body shivered as he sat upright on the bed, frantically rubbing his eyes to see why he was still seeing blurry shapes instead of the decent vision he had. Sure, it might not be 20/20, but he still had good enough vision when he—
“No,” A pitiful whimper escaped his lips as a horrible thought came to the forefront of his mind. He stumbled out of the bed, tripping on something, and landing face-first on the hard wood flooring, his head ringing as he recalled the memory of just what he was doing before he came here, in this body.
A late night reading session. He was done with dinner, chores, and even preparation for the next day. Being an intern, thankfully paid, meant he had to go to the office 5 days a week, which meant the commute, the chores, and making food took up most of the day.
So, the only time of the day he could use for himself was at night. After he was done with everything, and the reasonable hour to go to sleep was gone, he found himself drawn to his phone screen, reading works of fiction.
It was one such session, wherein he saw a comment and, for some odd reason, clicked on it, only to get a completely white screen that occupied the entire screen of his old phone. Despite his many attempts to go back, shut down the damned thing, and more, the white screen with the single line of text on it refused to budge. It read :
Congratulations! You’re chosen for an involuntary multiversal insertion. Please state your chosen powerset. It will arrive at your destination with you.
[.....]
He’d snorted at the blatant malware that had taken over his phone. Not a rare occurrence, especially with his propensity to visit websites that had less than stellar cybersecurity, but most of the time, the issue was promptly resolved with a simple hard reset. Apparently, the malware in the market had evolved as well.
Shrugging, he typed in a random desirable powerset, just to see what the next step was. It was not like his phone had anything important in it. No online banking since he didn't even have that amount of money. His social media was on there, but his social life was non-existent, so even if that was hacked, he couldn’t care less.
Foolishly, despite being someone who had read about this exact scenario playing out dozens of times, he typed in without careful thinking on his part.
[..Absolute Adaptive Regeneration...]
As soon as he did that, however, the screen began flickering for a moment before returning to his home page. He was so overjoyed that he immediately tapped on the chrome icon to resume his reading session, and then…
Then nothing. Then, he woke up here.
His eyes widened as he struggled to get up, his entire body feeling far weaker than usual, which was expected since he was in an entirely different body now. Probably much weaker as well, but hey, if that malware prompt could send him across worlds and into different bodies, then maybe they could also grant him the power he’d chosen?
Sure, it was not Omniversal Reality Warping or Absolute localised reality warping, but Adaptive Regeneration was a broken power on its own. The word he’d added at the beginning of the powerset, Absolute, should hopefully turn that into something that would allow him to survive whatever was headed his way. He was in no delusion that he would be sent to a happy go lucky world with that kind of power. Nah, with his luck, he was sent to a world where having that power still wouldn’t mean that he would be the top dog immediately.
Finally managing to get his pathetic body upright, he looked all around to check for two things. One was the specs that this body evidently needed, and secondly, the power he was supposed to get. The prompt said that it will arrive with him, but not in him already. So, he assumed that there were some steps that he had to take to gain that power.
One would understand just how desperate he was to get that power inside his body. It would at least help him get rid of this annoying, debilitating visual issue. His neck on a swivel, all he saw was a blurry world, and the room being in absolute darkness did not help. The small bit of light coming from the window was of no help.
“They just had to put me in a completely unknown room. They had to nerf me, huh?” he muttered to himself, feeling like an absolute idiot as he walked around, crouching and touching stuff with his hand to feel through their texture. Because he did not know what the power’s form was.
It could be a pill, a vial of mysterious liquid, something solid, a piece of hair. Hell, it could be a magic genie lamp for all he knew. There were just way too many possibilities, and he couldn’t waste time.
Who knows if this world had some absurd precog who’d already predicted his arrival and was on their way to finish him off before he got his superpower and managed to become a threat to their plans.
“Aha!” Finally! Some good news. He managed to find the specs. As if a fish that had found itself in water after flopping endlessly in the desert, he quickly put on his glasses and blinked a couple of times to let his vision get adjusted.
His vision cleared, he immediately went to town on the entire room, turning it upside down, all in a bid to find his superpower. In the middle of that, he had the brilliant idea to turn on all the lights.
With a much more well lit room, he turned everything over, checked every small item, and rubbed many things. Even tasted some, to see if he was missing something. Alas, even after turning the entire room into what looked like the aftermath of an Earthquake, he couldn’t find anything that resembled something that could give him superpowers.
He felt cheated at getting just one part of the deal. The stick part. He was now in a teenager’s body, feeling very weak, very tired, and just all around sick of the situation, even though it had only been an hour since he woke up here.
Shaking his head, he took in deep breaths and did what he did best. He did what his father had done, and his father had done all their lives.
He suppressed his emotions and tried to deal with the next thing in his life. It helped in the short term, but both his parents and both his grandparents died pretty early on in their lives, so he wasn’t exactly thrilled about his prospects.
Then again, he had no prospects here since he was now locked in an unfamiliar body with no memories whatsoever, in the middle of a very residential town with no high rise in sight, and without the promised superpower.
So, he went to the bathroom, to see what he had to deal with here. Hopefully, this body was not ugly. Or, it could be, as long as he was not in a death world. He would much rather be lonely and be rejected by women in this life than be forced to deal with apocalyptic bullshit all the time.
There was no point having a pretty face if the societal norms that revered and protected pretty faces crumbled, leaving him behind to fend for himself.
The light in the bathroom turned itself on, as he found himself facing….
“Huh,” He said out loud, touching his face. He was Japanese.
“I mean, I should have guessed it. Isekai genre and all that,” he mumbled to himself, pulling his face in different directions, the pain grounding him at the moment as he inspected his face.
Fair skin. Brown eyes. Black hair. Below average height, though this was Japan, so maybe he was average or even above average here?
The glasses were rectangular. Not how he would have styled it, but somehow, they went perfectly with the structure of his face. Strangely, he didn’t feel any body dysmorphia, which he just chalked up to isekai shenanigans. There was no rejection, not in his mind nor in his body, as he leaned closer to the mirror.
Sighing, he realised that the next step in the made up plan was to integrate with the world, but how would he do that? He had no memories of this body, and certainly no idea of what the world was. There was no computer or phone in the room to just conveniently look everything up.
He supposed that he could take a look at the school bag he ransacked in his haste to get to the superpower. Failing that, he could just fake a brain injury and amnesia to help smooth some things out.
Exhaling, he looked at himself in the mirror before bending down to splash some cold water on his face. He was in no mood to sleep now, not when he had to figure stuff out.
No point crying over—
His thoughts halted, as did his body, as he looked in the mirror. Specifically, at the glowing blue bottle that was directly behind him, stuck to the wall of the washroom by something unseen.
Whirling around, he immediately felt a dull ache in his head, likely due to Iron deficiency in his body, but he ignored that. Stumbling a bit, he snatched the bottle out of the air and looked at it, as if it was the most precious thing in the world.
For him? It truly was.
Tears flew freely from his eyes as the fears of having to live in a supernatural world without his powers came bubbling forward. Shaking his head, he slapped himself with the free hand, snapping himself out of the pity party.
He could do that later, after he had acquired the sweet, sweet adaptive powers that would make him invincible, given time.
Not questioning anything, he just uncorked the bottle, the wispy blue lights in the bottle slipping out of the bottle as he just gulped it all down in one go.
Normally, he wouldn’t have done that, but clearly, the shock that he was trying to suppress all this time was too much, as he didn’t hesitate in doing something that would give him a sense of security.
A relieved sigh escaped his lips as he looked at the now disintegrating bottle in his hand, the glass disappearing into thin air before it could touch the ground and make any sounds.
His eyes remained fixated on his hands before he stumbled back out of the bathroom towards his bed. He’d read enough fanfictions to know that this was the prime time for the protagonist to fall—