Orion and Rias spent another hour channeling all of the collected energy into the magic structure to activate it and form multiple different auxiliary spells to facilitate everything.
Orion barely understood most of her actions. While he could tell that she was creating runes to activate certain auxiliary spells, he had no idea what any of them did. It both cemented the fact that the magic system Rias talked about was completely different from the one that he was aware of regarding the DxD Verse and that she was far from an expert in that system. Every rune she made took quite a bit of effort from her, consuming a large amount of her mental power and even physical stamina. Occasionally, she would even fail and end up having to redo a rune.
An hour later, she was panting with exhaustion, dragging her feet to the main spell structure as she directly phased through it as if it didn't exist.
Orion, on the other hand, had been stuck as a mere bystander for the entire process, sitting silently on a chair, left to observe her actions with curious fascination. Unlike normal magic circles, whatever runes she was working with were all completely abstract things to him, of the same vein as the four-dimensional magic structure.
As Rias took a deep breath after entering the core of the structure, she turned to look at Orion flatly.
"No way…" Orion gawked for a moment.
"What?" She said, showing a confused expression.
"You're… never mind," he said, changing his words. The moment she had looked at him, he sensed her heartbeat quicken, showing signs of nervousness that slipped through her robotic interior. He decided not to ruin the moment by calling her out on it. "Need me to help activate the circle?"
"Just stick close to me so that you don't end up losing part of your body," she said. "I've done this by myself more times than I care to remember. You just need to sit in my heart and look pretty while I take care of everything, okay, cupcake?"
"I'll show you a fucking cupcake," Orion walked up to her. "When I thoroughly spank your ass after learning magic."
He melted into black slime and slipped in through the opening in the structure. Still, instead of merging into Rias, he reformed his human form right in front of her, forcing her to lean back and shift as the tiny cocoon immediately got cramped, forcing Rias to bend backward.
"H-hey!" She exclaimed with an outraged expression, looking up at his face angrily.
"You're shorter than I realized," he smiled, putting his hand on her waist. "Like your head barely reaches my chin."
"No, you're just absurdly tall. Compensating much?" She shot back.
"Compensating for what, exactly? I'm a slime. Even using a fraction of my current mass limit can allow me to turn into a fifteen-foot-tall man. I could literally put you up on my shoulder and let you feel like a little girl," he chuckled, wrapping his other hand around her waist, making their lower bodies press together.
"Where are you putting your hand?" She grabbed his other hand that was on her side, moving higher, and blocked its ascent.
"I accompanied you from the last reality to this one. I will continue to accompany you from this one to the next…and every other time you decide to hop to another reality," he said, smiling gently as he pulled her close. "We're going to the new place together, or dying together. There is no third option."
"You sure about that?" She said aggressively. "Cheesy man."
"I can be a lot more cheesy, you'll come to realize soon," he said.
She didn't say anything and kept looking at him with a serious frown.
"I'm a hundred and ten percent sure of staying with you," he said. "Now activate the spell."
"…I can't with you in here," she said. "I need room to maneuver."
"Pity, I thought I could hold you in my arms as we travelled this time," he said with a sigh, and melting into black goop that entered Rias' body.
"Stay close to me, Orion," she mumbled. "This is the first time I've felt hopeful in years. Don't take that away from me."
[As long as it's up to me, we're going to live and die together. Unless you do something truly horrible, like letting someone else touch you. Then I'll lock you up in a permanent bondage and fuck you until your brain melts.]
"Charming," she said dryly. "You know just what to say to make a girl's heart swoon."
[That's just because you haven't tried it before. Bondage can be therapeutic and very pleasurable when done right. You can even ask Irina and Xenovia if you have doubts.]
She shook her head and didn't say anything in response; instead, raising her hands, she created a normal magic circle and poured most of her remaining magical energy into it. Orion visibly saw the cocoon close up as its four-dimensional form stabilized, reducing the opening to a much smaller one at the top. That stabilization also allowed him to observe the cocoon, letting him conclude that it was completely identical to the one he'd first seen when he bonded with Rias.
[I'm confused…]
"What is it?"
[Can you not perceive four-dimensional structures either? I was looking through your eyes, but before the cocoon stabilized, it was the same wonky figure as before.]
"Just because I can create something out of rote memorization doesn't mean anything, Orion," Rias smiled. "If you asked me to modify this spell or do anything to it, I would be just as helpless as you. Like you, I can't perceive or tap into the fourth dimension. I don't even get most of that stuff."
[So you had external help…]
"Duh," she rolled her eyes. "Before this whole multiverse debacle, I was just an above-average High Class Devil who got lucky by reincarnating the Red Dragon Emperor as her servant. I didn't have anything truly notable that could make me stand up to the mantle of Princess of Destruction…I was no more than a figurehead who possessed the same power as the strongest Satan. None of that truly reflected me."
Orion went silent at her self-deprecating tone.
"All in all, don't expect me to have all your answers," she said. "Now brace yourself."
Suddenly, Orion went blind as a bright crimson light flashed in Rias' eyes. Unlike the last time, when he was in the middle of the bonding process at the point of the spell's activation, allowing him to perceive the two planet-sized dragons duking it out, this time, it was all a black void imperceptible to Rias, and by extension, him.
I need to get more familiar with my innate abilities… Certain things should come naturally to me, but don't. Then again, what could I have done in two weeks, one of which I was completely occupied with Irina and Xenovia… All I could figure out was colors and imitation in the week before that because Akeno didn't require too much of my active attention.
With that thought, he lost consciousness alongside Rias as they breached through the Dimensional Gap and broke through reality. At his final moment in this reality, he felt that he caught a glimpse of Great Red directly in his mind, as if the Dragon of Dreams was sending him a message. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite get anything beyond the faint mental glimpse of the creature.
…
When Orion regained consciousness, Rias was still unconscious. He couldn't help but feel that something was amiss. The previous time, let alone passing out, he remembered immediately appearing in the new reality with Rias already fully conscious and aware of everything. He didn't wake her up and first decided to examine the situation, bringing a part of his body out from the side of her arm and forming just his head.
Still inside that cocoon… Did it fail or something? I have too little information to form any informed conjectures…
"Hey, red, wake up," Orion said, bumping his head against hers to jolt her awake. "I think you botched the spell."
Her eyes suddenly shot open in panic as she slapped him across the face
"Hey, fuck you," he said with an annoyed frown. Immediately, his hand emerged from her waist and directly smacked her ass. "Don't resort to violence for no reason."
She looked at him with an almost venomous look as her hands made their way to her backside, shielding herself from potential further assault.
"What? Would you rather that I hit your face instead?" he asked.
"What's going on?" She asked, moving on after giving him a dirty look.
"I'm asking you that," he said. "I think you botched the spell. We're stuck in the cocoon."
"We're stuck outside?" Rias' heart raced.
"Define outside," he asked.
"Outside is outside. Think of the Dimensional Gap as a road that leads to countless other universes within the same reality. My spell piggybacks on the nature of that void to shift to other realities. Where we are right now is between either reality's Dimensional Gap, hence Outside."
"So—" Orion had no chance to voice any enquiry before Rias stepped forward and pushed the cocoon's wall. It got visibly deformed as if she was pushing into a sheet of low-tensile stretchable rubber, producing a high-frequency whirring sound that prompted a pained grunt from Orion. "Stop!" He grunted, forming two hands over his head to cover his ears, but it was useless as the whirring sound continued hurting him. He went back inside Rias to mitigate the pain, but even that was useless as the sound kept getting louder.
Are you telling me I'm weak to fucking sound?! Goddamned Knull, I'll kill that bastard one day.
Orion felt a bubbling sensation of rage overtake him and emerged from Rias, wrapping around her body like a full-body exoskeleton armor that directly took control of her musculature and forced her back from the edge of the cracking cocoon. It slowly regained its previous structure once Orion yanked her back.
"What?" Rias growled, not sounding angry or displeased, but far from pleasant.
"Tell me what you're doing first," he said, suppressing the human instinct to huff while recovering from the sudden assault. His voice came through the equivalent of a speaker inside the helmet that was part of the full-body suit covering Rias.
"Free my body, Orion," she said. "Before I'm forced to tap into my dwindling reserve energy that won't be recovered until we enter that reality."
The threat wasn't lost on him as he glanced at the system panel to get an exact reading of her situation.
Magic Capacity: 75/10,000 [58,439] (High-Class Devil — Suppressed)
"Do it, I dare you. Best case, you survive the destruction of your heart and are stranded here alone with no way to recover; worst case, we both die together; possible case, I survive and use you as nourishment to empower myself and get out of here. Your call, red."
She took a deep breath as Orion observed her racing heartbeat return to normal. "You're right. I was being impulsive. Free my body, and I will apologize for catching you off guard."
"Tsk, a conditional apology is as good as no apology at all," he sneered, but still freed her body from his control, though he maintained the exoskeleton, ready to take control the moment she did something dumb. "Tell me what's going on?"
"Mind telling me how you gained control over my body first?" Rias said, flexing her limbs as much as she could within the bounds of the cocoon.
"A mix of my fetish for submission and bondage, and the fact that I had full access to two church nuns for a week, with no bounds to hold me back. It's easy for me to directly bypass the nerve signals sent to your muscles and take control," he said, not wanting to devolve things further and get into a dick-measuring contest with Rias. "Your turn."
"It's complicated," she said before immediately feeling the body armor start to constrict around her body. "It really is, Orion. But it's a good thing, I promise. I've had this happen before."
"Fine," he stopped further constricting her body. "I want more details."
***
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