Dragons and Dragonknights (DXD/Dragonquest: The Adventures of Dai)

[Firewillreign]

So I recently got into DXD through the Light Novels and fics.

(I couldn't watch the anime. I tried and made it about halfway through the first episode before I had to stop because it was already a miracle I didn't cringe hard enough to snap my neck.)

Anyway, I like some aspects of the setting, though not all, and I have plenty of issues with it - and I'm not referring to the perverted stuff which was so absurd right from the beginning that it sidestepped creepy and jumped right into absurd - so this is my potential attempt to work with it a little bit and see what comes of it.

Anyway, this is my attempt to write a crossover fic that inserts one of my favorite anime characters (Dai from the Dragonquest adventures of Dai anime) into a wildly AU DXD around canon start.

The main premise?

What if Trihexa was unsealed before Canon start?

PS - This is, as always, an experimental prologue chapters. This is not yet a new story.

---

Dying was one thing.

Waking up from certain oblivion was quite another.

Dai came to at the bottom of a steaming, ash-grey crater, groggily blinking his eyes open to the sight of an overcast sky, covered in a fine layer of soot and dust that clung to him like a second skin and with a subtle but undeniably pervasive sense of wrongness thrumming through his very bones.

He shouldn't be alive.

It was a disturbing and morbid thought in hindsight, but one that was -despite the heavy muddling fog clearing from his mind and the glacially slow rhythm of his drowsy thoughts - entirely valid.

He shouldn't be alive.

The Black Core bomb that he'd sacrificed himself carrying away from the surface world and up into the farthest heights of the heavens above had annihilated him, wholly and completely. He hadn't truly felt it - the cataclysmic detonation had been too fast for that - but he'd had one moment of awareness before the end to acknowledge the blinding, cleaving eruption of light and to smile, fully content that his friends and the world were finally safe even if was at the cost of him, and then...

Nothing.

That had been the end.

Even now, Dai knew with an eerie, otherworldly certainty that he had died, completely and inarguably. The explosion had erased him utterly.

And yet... here he was, awake again.

With a soft groan and lurch, he moved to pick himself off the ground. He wasn't quite exhausted, par say, but he felt worn and ached in an unpleasant way he couldn't quite place. The dirt beneath him shifted and crunched as he got to his feet, and he grimaced at the smell of old smoke and burnt debris that hit his nose as he tried to pat himself down, sharp enough that he could almost taste it.

What was that?

Better yet, where even was he?

Slowly panning his eyes around the bowl crater growing out around him, he frowned. He approached the nearest jagged, uneven border and placed his hand against it. The material gave away and crumbled at the slightest touch.

"Well," He frowned. "I can't climb that."

He'd wind up buried underneath it, and while digging himself out from it would be relatively easy - he'd managed a lot more on less before - but he was already covered in enough filth.

Carefully, he closed his eyes and tried to call up a familiar spark of magic. He half expected it to backfire into that awful cramping jerk that overcame him whenever he'd made the mistake of pulling on an empty pool - the final battle against Vearn had taken just about everything he had - but to his delighted surprise, his power welled up through him quite readily.

It wasn't quite at the volume he was used to working with, and nothing close to the heady, overwhelming nature of his dragon crest, but that familiar wave of warmth was there, and he could tell it was healing nicely.

Feeling emboldened, he took the reigns of that recovering power and willed himself to rise. A split second later, the spell took hold, and Dai's feet left the ground as he soared up and out of the crater.

The view beyond it was... not familiar.

And not particularly 'good' by any definition of the word.

A shattered, ravaged husk of a strange town - because it was far too large to be a village - stretched out around him, eerily quiet and not quite like anything he had ever seen before.

The roads were not made of stone and far too wide, the few homes that he could see standing were oddly shaped and strangely uniform, orderly and with far more glass than seemed reasonable for anyone to bother with or afford, and while dim and reduced beneath the grey clouds and the smog and smoke he could still smell in the air, there seemed to be a far greater use of colour... nearly everywhere that wasn't a pulverized ruin of piled debris and the aftermath of what had to have been a ruinous bonfire of flames.

Looking at what must have once been someplace truly grand, tellingly empty of any people at all, Dai felt a wave of crushing sadness. He'd seen and learned terrible, tragic things on his quest to stop Vearn - the human dwellings ravaged by the Dark King's armies, the story of Alkeed Kingdom and the truth about his parents, and more beyond that.

This was just more of the same, but the lack of novelty didn't make it any less tragic.

"What happened here?"

His voice carried on the wind, but there was no answer... at first.

Then the air all around him seemed to shift just so, and a brilliant burst of golden light washed over him and froze him solid.

He knew that light.

Dai turned and flung himself back before the tears had even finished forming in his eyes.

"Gomechan!"

His first and oldest friend was unchanged - a sentient, inflated dewdrop of pure gold only just large enough to fit between Dai's palms, with shimmering feathered wings and features that were as soft as the rest of him.

"Dai!"

Objectively, Dai knew that he was more than that. Gome-chan was the Tear Of The Gods before he ever was his friend. A gift from the heavens with great power of his own, just like Dai's father had been, and how Dai himself was through him.

He knew that.

He just didn't care enough to let it change him.

With a half-tearful laugh, he plucked his somehow living friend out of the air above him and cradled him to his chest with as much strength as was safe for him to bear, bobbing and spinning into an uneven flight as he held him close.

For his part, Gomechan wasn't even trying not to sob himself, and the eerie silence of their surroundings retreated from around them like a wounded beast.

"I'm-" Dai finally managed to gasp eventually, struggling to get himself under control. "I don't understand. How are you here?"

He too had died, after all. Taking a blow to protect Dai and help them on their path to fulfilling their dreams. It was only the joy of the reunion and the knowledge that Dai had made damn sure the sacrifice was worth it that pushed back the wave of guilt at that memory.

"I don't know!" Gomechan sounded so delighted about it that Dai's befuddled, wild grin came of its own accord. "I faded - I know I did. All I remember is wishing that I'd never forget you all in my next incarnation, and then... nothing. I woke up here and saw you."

"I see."

Dai truly, truly didn't. But that didn't matter right then.

"I'm so, so glad to see you, Gome." His eyes softened, and the sheer contentment he felt was a power all of its own. "So glad."

Losing Gomechan had felt like losing a part of his soul - a jagged, uneven wound that had only now healed over when the missing piece slid back into place.

If this was the afterlife, then the devastation below them didn't matter - Dai would be grateful enough for this and this alone.

"Strange." Gomechan's wings fluttered in his grip, and Dai finally released him, reassured that he wouldn't disappear the moment he did. "Are you alright?"

"I-"

He hesitated. There were no words he could think of to describe how he felt.

Then something else occurred to him.

"I defeated Vearn."

Gomechan's eyes lit up with delight.

"Real-!?"

He was cut off when something behind them exploded with a deafening eruption of light and flame.

Dai spun around, one hand geared to protect Gomechan and the other already crackling with the furious beginnings of a Sizzle spell, but there was no attack coming.

Not to him, at least.

In the distance, far enough away that he could observe the light show from afar, was the beginnings of a roaring inferno, and Dai could feel the magic and power that had spawned it even from here.

"Dai!" Gomechan hovered over him fretfully. "There's something wrong. I can sense fear and malice over there - there's someone bieng hurt!"

Dai didn't hesitate. He reached over his shoulder and grasped the familiar hilt of the sword - his sword, that a part of him was half-certain hadn't been there a second ago. The same sword that was just as alive as he and would always return to his side when recalled or otherwise - and rocketed forwards with a burst of air akin to thunder.

...​

It takes him a moment to cross across the raved town.

Kuoh is the name he'll learn later down the line)

When he does, his confusion skyrockets.

He'd been expecting the worst - some remnant of Vearn's Dark Army, or some other would-be monster looking it hurt innocents. It was distressingly common.

Instead, the moment Dai pulled out of his flight, he found himself locking eyes with a boy who couldn't have been any older than he was.

Soft brown met unearthly crimson, and the boy's features - haggard and pale a second before - stilled in shock before they morphed into utter delight.

"I found you!"

Dai blinked.

Besides the boy stood a girl who was only a few years older, dressed in strange robes and with golden hair that was thrown into disarray and clung to her forehead in matted clamps. She looked up at Dai with an edge of caution, chest heaving from the aftermath of a long run.

The reason was self-explanatory. A distance behind them a veritable inferno blazed, strange golden flames flickering and filling the air with acrid smoke and a sharp and menacing glow.

"Millicas-chan-!"

"That's him, Asia! I told you the answer was in Kuoh!"

Dai exchanged a confused look with Gomechan, who had settled onto his shoulder as he flew, but before he could ask, another stranger made themselves known.

A man shot out of the flames behind them and rocketed across to them, soaring nearly as fast as Dai did on wings made of fire.

He giggled, and Gomechan made a sound of surprise like a whistle going off.

"You!" The man roared hatefully, blue eyes wild, and Dai recoiled as his hand erupted with a burst of threatening flame.

What even was this?

"Another one of the bastard's wretches? I'll incinerate you!"

The boy beneath them - Millicas - paled. "Riser, don't! That's him!"

"I-!" Riser paused, arm freezing mid-motion as he made to lob a fireball at him - he'd have missed, but the meaning of it was still the same. "What?"

Riser sounded as suddenly lost as he had been since this bizarre encounter had begun.

Unfortunately, he didn't have any more time to ask questions than Dai had.

"Well, well!"

An unnaturally loud voice fell onto them from above, high and slow, and filled with a deliberate edge of malice.

Dai and Riser turned around as a dozen strangers descended above, and the former stared.

All of them were dressed strangely, and all of them seemed to leer and bare their teeth at him in a way that couldn't possibly be mistaken for anything less than hostile but he was only mildly unnerved by the black, leathery wings that all of them bore.

"Are they darklings?" He whispered under his breath to Gomechan, who bobbed to the side and shook his wings in refusal.

"They feel nothing like anything I've ever before, Dai. Be careful."

"I will."

But the man with flaming wings - Riser - clearly did, and he only had eyes for the leader of the pack.

"Diodora!" He snarled, voice black with poison, and the thin, pale-skinned and green-haired man turned to laugh at him with cruel delight.

"Riser! Looking a little worse for wear, eh?" He clapped his hands mockingly. "I'll admit, you lead me on quite the merry trail - I would never have thought you'd be stupid enough to return to this hollow mortal shithole, but I suppose the vaunted Phenex regeneration can't do anything about inborn stupidity."

Diodora tutted mockingly. For a moment, his eyes passed over Dai, before almost visibly dismissing him as a threat.

(That was a mistake)

"Such a shame."

"Bastard."

"I'll have you know my parents were married." His lips pulled into another cruel smirk. "Though I can understand why you wouldn't put much stock in the concept, mind you, given the recent developments."

He said the last word with relish, and Dai felt the flames on Riser's wings flare all the hotter.

"Oh, did I strike a nerve? My apologies. If it makes you feel any better-" Diodora floated back a step, before angling his head down towards the two on the ground - Millicas and Asia. Something dark and twisted came alight in his eyes. "-you won't be alive to suffer that much longer. Bring me the last Gremory and the Nun."

His followers began to shift eagerly, and the malice in the air grew pointed and deadly as Diodora turned back to them.

"Kill the other two, though leave a little to work with. Lord Shalba might appreciate a trophy."

And that's all Dai needed to hear.

The air cracked again as he moved, and Diodora's eyes managed to widen before the Dragonknight buried his fist into it with an impact that sent him careening back so quickly he disappeared into the towering pillar of flames behind him and struck the earth hard enough for everyone present to feel the impact in their teeth.

"Well?" Dai frowned sternly as Diodora's stunned followers turned back to him and stared with wide eyes, just the same as Riser, stunned at the audacity of what had just occurred. "Are you just going to float there, or are we going to fight?"

"No." Riser snarled, appearing at the side of his new apparent ally with a flash of heat. "They're going to burn."

"Oh dear," Gomechan murmured and backed off, unsuited for combat.

Beneath them, Millicas cheered and shot forward to help as the devils recovered from their shock and promptly lunged for their throats, and everything went right to hell in a handbasket.

(Or, not quite. But soon.)

...

Diodora:

https://imgur.com/13SeYO5

Millicas in the background:

https://imgur.com/Z4ONgEy

As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.

PS - Dragonquest is an excellent manga and anime, though I'm aware it didn't get a lot of exposure due to the fact that it came out in the 90s and the (very good) remake seemed to fly under the radar internationally, so I'll probably post little informationals here or there just so people who know nothing of the anime understand who Dai and Gomechan are and maybe a thing or two they might obscurely reference.