Disclaimer - I don't own any of the characters appearing in High School DXD or the Anime or the manga whatsoever.
Kuoh, Japan
–Motohama Kenji–
When his eyes snapped open, it was already dark, and the second he realised what had happened, he was on his feet and bolting out of the hill as if his life depended on it, and in a way, it did. He remembered the face his mother made last time he was this late. Halfway through, he opened his mouth, and thankfully, there were no missed calls. It either meant his mother had decided to address everything when he reached home or, she was just late from work.
He desperately hoped for the latter to be true. It would be way easier to just pretend that he was home far earlier than right now, and pretend everything was normal. Because the alternative was an explanation, and he didn’t know how he could explain things to her without blatantly lying. Even if he tried lying, he was never really good at it.
She might pick up on something, and then he would be left with explaining his lies. He didn’t want to hurt his mother like that, especially since she had nothing aside from him. All she did, she did for him. He knew that she didn’t really need to work all that hard at work. The only reason she did so was that she wanted to make sure he had enough money for him to last beyond college, on top of the house and her investments.
He really couldn’t find it in himself to hurt her, and yet, he knew that she was not built to handle the shock that would inevitably enter her system when she realised that the world she knew was barely the cover of the book. An entire universe of supernatural, hidden behind a facade of mundane, and he had no idea how her established world view being shattered would affect her mind.
She might be fine, or she might go crazy. He had no idea, and finding the answer to that question scared him a lot. He had a lot of time during the night to think about it, and in the end, he couldn’t find any suitable answer.
He either continued to keep everything secret from her, which would not work because inevitably, no matter how strong and prepared he might be, he was bound to slip, and then he would have to deal with telling her about the supernatural world and his lies, or he told her everything right now and then watched her deal with stuff he had no control over. He had no strength to even safeguard himself, let alone someone else.
He didn’t know what he would do if his mother’s erratic behavior caught the attention of someone on the supernatural side and they tried to remove her memories, and somehow botched the job, forever robbing him of his sweet, sweet mother. It kept him suspended in a state of panic as he couldn’t sleep, right up until the panic receded into a dull feeling. Present yet not all consuming, like it was when he first imagined his mother becoming a vegetable just because the people responsible for keeping the veil over the mundane world did not do their job properly.
All because he couldn’t lie properly to his mother’s face.
His thoughts continued to churn as he ran home, consciously making sure that he didn’t run too fast, because he definitely could. If he had to guess, as long as he had space to ramp up, he could easily outrun the cars that ran at speed limits in the city.
He had no way of accurately measuring that, beyond using the GPS speedometer on his phone, but he had very little space to truly ramp up his speed, and before his phone could properly register his speed, he’d run out of safe space.
Shaking his head, he skidded to a halt in front of his house. Their modest, two story house, very old yet built to last. He took out his key and opened the door, slumping as he saw darkness in the house. He had some enhanced senses, but not to the point of them being superhuman. He had no idea how he would adapt to inferior senses aside from his eye defects, but he could at least sense if someone was standing in the dark, waiting for him with a slipper or spatula in her hand.
Thankfully, there was no one in the house, so he quickly thanked Big G for this, even though he was deader than dead, and quickly freshened up, changed his clothes, and put the textbooks on the table, making it look as if he had come home on time and finished his homework as well.
Once that was done, he settled into his bed, waiting for his mom to come home. It was getting late, later than usual, but she had come home even later than this, so he wasn't too worried. Sometimes, there were some assholes at work who just wouldn’t take no for an answer and wanted Mom to either stay late to finish the work early or take her drinking, as was customary with most salaried people here.
It wasn’t even that it was men who did that. No, women were just as perpetrators and enablers of the toxic work culture here in Japan as men were. Shaking his head, he put his hands behind his head and stared at the top of the ceiling, his mind going back to the grave problem he was facing, about his mother.
Then, abruptly, he sat upright and slapped himself, hard, and at this point, he had mutilated himself so much that the sound created was very loud, so much so that he immediately winced, as that sound definitely reached their neighbours. He waited a beat, and when no one shouted anything, he sighed and slumped on his bed.
Resisting the urge to just go out and do something with his power or do something about his power at home was hard, but what was he going to do? Realistically, he couldn’t do anything without fuel, and unless he figured out something like using energy to fuel his power, he couldn’t adapt to stuff willy nilly.
Hell, as he had come to realise, his power could sometimes put him in trouble as well. This morning, he hadn’t even realised his power was being activated or that his power was eating him from the inside out, just so it could adapt to mind magic in real time. That just reminded him that activation of his power wasn’t consciously done, and he knew that it could easily become a con for him, especially if someone had advanced knowledge of the mechanics of his power.
Even if he couldn’t think of something right now, he was sure that someone like Ajuka could easily figure out a way to use his own power against him, trap him using some absurd, convoluted plan, though the Super Devil certainly did not need to do that, as the Devil could erase him with a thought right now.
That realisation just made him want to go out and work on himself, but he stayed put, and as if the Big G was rewarding him for his restraint, even though he was deader than dead, the bell rang as the tired voice of his mom rang out.
“I’m back,”
He smiled, hopped out of bed, and, in his excitement, just jumped directly from the first floor to the ground floor, ignoring the dozen or so steps in between.
Unfortunately, while he had this idea in his brain that his power was consuming all the calories he was consuming en masse, and that his body was unaffected, outside of all the strengthening done. Alas, he was very much wrong. His body, while getting strengthened, had also gained a lot of mass. Compact and dense muscle mass, but he had gained a lot of weight.
And all that weight, flying through the air, and landing straight on the hardwood flooring, with just his two legs as the points of contact, meant that he didn’t so much as land on the floor, but through the floor.
“AAAAAAAaa!” Predictably, his mother screamed, dropping the bag of groceries, as he looked up at her horrified expression with a shaky smile on his face.
“Um, oops?”