Devil is Live

By TwinEnigma

Disclaimer: I do not own the series Naruto or Oh My Goddess. I write this for fun and no profit. Enjoy!

Sasuke Uchiha had until very recently believed himself to be a fortunate man. He had never had much in the way of bad luck, not since he was a very small child, and he'd always been a good student, who'd never run afoul of anyone except his perpetually absentee older brother-turned-guardian, Itachi, but that was neither here nor there and Sasuke had long ago come to terms with the fact that his brother was incapable of being tied down to anything mundane like locations and steady jobs, let alone his own flesh and blood. Sasuke, on the other hand, happened to be adverse to that sort of chaos and so he worked quite hard to pass his placement exams. His results were good enough and he had been accepted into Nekomi Institute of Technology, which was exactly where he wanted to be for what he wanted to do with his life. He'd even joined the Motor Club.

However, it was becoming rapidly evident that he must have royally screwed up and pissed off the wrong deity in a past life, as that would be the only way any of the events of the past two days would begin to make any logical sense.

Sasuke groaned and let his head drop down onto his textbook as the yelling escalated another notch and another jarring crash issued from the other side of the room. He didn't even want to know what they'd just broken.

It all boiled down to a single phone call he'd made the night before.

And Thai food, he thought, scowling. Thai food which he had not in fact ended up having for dinner that night, because he had accidentally dialed the direct line for some bloody demonic wish-granting business office in Hell instead of the Thai restaurant three blocks down from his apartment. Actually, now he was beginning to think it was less of an accident on his part, but more like they'd tapped into his phone line and just waited for him to call someone.

Sasuke groaned again: this was insane! Demons and gods only existed in stories until last night, but now they were real. In fact, they were having a fight in his bloody apartment!

The demon had been the first to appear and he'd done so less than ten seconds after Sasuke had hung up the phone. He looked human enough – wild blond hair, blue eyes and the lanky build of a teenager – although he had these strange red stripes on his cheeks, three to each side, and a wave-like red swirl smack in the center of his forehead which had been glowing like hot coals at the time. After calling him a bastard for hanging up on him, the demon then proceeded to introduce himself, complete with business card, as "Demon First Class, Limited License Kyuubi of the Demon Office, Hellfire Settlements and Bonds Division." Sasuke had practically heard the capitals on those words without even having to look at the card the demon had shoved in his face.

Said demon had then demanded to hear his wish so they could negotiate a proper price, which was right about where Sasuke drew the line. He wasn't an idiot and he knew better than to go blurting off the first thing that came to mind when the word 'contract' was involved – one of the few things he could thank that directionally impaired brother of his for teaching him before he left for good – and he'd seen enough horror films to know that 'price' with demons usually meant 'souls and/or giving up something that wasn't really worth what you got with the wish.' And so, he'd refused to make a wish.

Demon First Class Kyuubi was not amused. In fact, his exact words were something along the lines of "I'm not going to fucking leave until you make that wish, you bastard."

Sasuke idly wondered if wishing the blond demon would go the hell away and leave him alone would work. As it turned out, Kyuubi could make himself one hell of a pain in the ass. The demon was loud, obnoxious, had a habit of popping up all over the place like some sort of fucking ninja, made a mess of the apartment, and ate more ramen than should be medically safe, let alone physically possible. The demon also had spent the entire night watching porn with the volume cranked all the way up just to annoy him and, consequently, he'd only maybe managed an hour or two of actual sleep last night before being woken by what sounded like heavy demolition somewhere down the street. Naturally, he tossed on some clothes and shoes and bolted off in the direction of the noise before the demon could get a word in edgewise.

In retrospect, he should have just stayed in bed.

The racket came from the nearby Tarikihongan Temple and Sasuke had naturally assumed something bad had happened. He didn't notice that no one on the street or in the other buildings seemed to find the noise unusual in the slightest until Kyuubi pointed it out to him much later on in the day. He was a little thrown for a loop when he entered the temple courtyard and was assured by one of the Temple residents, a Morisato Keiichi (former leader of the Nekomi Tech Motor Club), that the explosive ruckus was the result of his girlfriend's sisters squabbling, which apparently happened to be a near-daily occurrence.

It was then that they were both attacked and chased practically into the street by a refrigerator with teeth the size of garden shears.

Kyuubi didn't show up until after Morisato-san's girlfriend somehow sent the rogue fridge packing, though Sasuke was certain the demon had been watching and probably laughing his ass off, and then the demon had the gall to suggest to the couple that Sasuke was always imagining things and overreacting. Honestly, if it hadn't been for the demon mentioning that classes started soon, Sasuke might have managed to stamp out his mortification long enough to strangle the smirking blond bastard then and there.

Classes provided little respite from the chaos, as Kyuubi had taken it upon himself to enroll in all of Sasuke's classes under an assumed identity and simply wouldn't leave him alone through the day. Sasuke had never looked forward to going back to his apartment more in his entire life.

And that's when the goddess literally landed right in his lap. Fair skinned with pale pink hair and dressed in a white bodysuit with magenta trim, the goddess looked like a refugee from a futuristic science-fiction movie. It had not escaped his notice that she had markings on her face in roughly the same places that the demon did, though they were a pale purple and consisted of symmetrical tomoe on each cheek and a small diamond in the center of her forehead, as opposed to the stripes and swirl that the demon bore. And, based on that, he had initially assumed she was from the same office of Hell that the demon was from.

The error in his assumption became painfully clear the minute she pulled a large battle-axe out of nowhere and charged at Kyuubi with a loud battle cry, green eyes blazing.

Sasuke, having officially gone well beyond overload on the weird shit scale, had retreated to the safety of his thoughts, using an engineering textbook as a shield, which brought him right back around to his previous mental revelation that he must have offended some deity in a past life (and, ergo, back to the present).

The college student blinked wearily and raised his head. It had suddenly become eerily quiet. Was it over?

Kyuubi, demon first class limited, stomped into the room and sat down at the other side of the table, his expression that of blatant frustration and annoyance. The pink haired goddess followed him and sat down directly across from the demon, her face schooled in a neutral manner.

"This," the blond demon said suddenly, "is Sakura – a Valkyrie." The word rolled off the demon's lips with a sneer.

It might have just been the malicious tone he'd used, but Sasuke ventured an educated guess that Kyuubi did not like Valkyries very much at all. Small wonder, given that she'd gone after him with a giant bloody battle axe.

She gave the demon a sharp glare and then turned back to Sasuke, offering him a warm smile and a business card. "Forgive me for not introducing myself properly earlier, Sasuke-kun. I am Sakura, goddess first class, special duty, restricted license. I'm with the Combat Division of Heaven."

Sasuke blinked. "Combat... division?" he repeated slowly.

"Yes," she replied, quite matter-of-factly. "I was assigned to guard you as part of a routine exercise."

Kyuubi growled, glaring across the table at her, "A likely story!"

The combat goddess returned the scalding glare in kind. "I certainly didn't expect to run into you when Inuyasha-sensei gave me the assignment, fox brat!"

At that, the demon started cussing, grabbed his hair and shouted, "Gah! I knew it! He sent you to harass me on purpose! That high and mighty bastard's probably laughing his ass off right now!"

Sakura's eyes narrowed dangerously. "That 'high and mighty bastard' as you so delicately put it is my sensei."

The blond demon only narrowly avoided being split in two as the offended goddess's giant axe came crashing down through the table. Sasuke, wisely, decided that this would be an auspicious time to retreat into another, safer part of the apartment and wait out round two.

But then, the demon chuckled, his face breaking into a wide grin. "Just like old times, ne, Sakura-chan?"

"Idiot," Sakura smiled, lowering her eyes and offered him a hand to help him to his feet. "I've missed you, you know."

Sasuke stared at them in complete bewilderment. What the hell had just happened? Weren't they enemies or something?

"We knew each other – way back, when we were younger," Kyuubi explained offhandedly, having noticed his confusion. "Things were... different back then."

Things began falling into place. The insistence of showing him their business cards when they introduced themselves, the suspicion and fighting despite having known each other in their youths – this was behavior he could understand. It was as if they were from two competing large corporations and he was a market share. Friendships and business were entirely separate things, and even the best of friends could be fierce rivals in business.

"I can't believe you still have those clothes," Sakura said, looking the demon over and shaking her head as tugged on the shoulder of his black and orange jogging suit. "Don't tell me, you've still got that horrid orange and blue one, too?"

Kyuubi shook his head, smiling, "Nah, the Daimakaicho burned it the second I passed my exam. Demons aren't supposed to wear orange, or some such rot."

"Hah! You'll never stop hearing that, will you?" the goddess grinned. "So, what brings you to Midgard?"

The demon jerked a thumb towards Sasuke and replied, "I got a contract with Sasuke here. Fucking idiot won't make his wish though, or I'd have been out of here yesterday."

Sasuke glared at him. "Stop calling me that."

"Only if you make the wish, asshole," Kyuubi retorted.

"No!" Sasuke growled.

Sakura raised her eyebrows suggestively. "Maybe he'll get it right this time."

"Are you even listening to me?!"

"Oh, that would be lovely," the demon said, completely ignoring the NIT student. "It's been so long since we've been back to Konoha."

"I'm not making a stupid wish!" Sasuke roared.

Both entities became quiet, as though suddenly realizing he was there.

"I won't," he clarified, clenching his hands into fists. "Wishing never solved anything. All I want right now is for the two of you to shut up and tell me why – why me? Out of everyone you could have picked, why me and not Itachi? He's never happy, so why couldn't you have bothered him instead? I'm sure he has plenty of wishes. And another thing, what did you mean by 'get it right this time'? What's Midgard? What's Konoha? Tell me!"

Kyuubi bit his lip, looking down, and then said, "We didn't pick you. Nidheg, the demon server, pulled your name on its own. As for Sakura, she was assigned to you because of me. Before I caught up with you at the temple this morning, I encountered her sensei and probably wasn't as respectful of him as I should have been to a god of his rank."

"You didn't call him gramps, did you?" Sakura asked. "You did, didn't you?"

"No!" the demon protested, sighing. "I'm not stupid! Anyway, where were we?"

"Konoha... Midgard," Sasuke answered, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring at them.

Sakura sighed, "I can answer that. Midgard is the name we give to the realms of mortals on this universal superstring which have no more than four perceivable dimensions. We maintain and manipulate your universal superstring through our respective servers with the supercomputer Yggdrasil."

"It's responsible for regulating our appearance and powers here in this realm as well," Kyuubi added, indicating the marking on his forehead. "Think of these as I/O ports or something."

"Konoha – Konohagakure no Sato is a village in a pocket universe in Midgard," Sakura continued, lowering her eyes. "Once upon a time, Kyuubi and I lived there, as citizens of the Land of Fire. But that is in the past and we cannot return, as we are no longer mortal."

Sasuke weighed the information, silently mulling it over. He could understand the universal superstring aspect of it and most of the supercomputer portion – though he figured it would have to be external to this universe to work – but his mind kept drifting back to the name Konoha and now the Land of Fire as well. He knew those names, somehow. They seemed so familiar. Finally, he queried, "So, what does that have to do with me?"

"We can't tell you. We're not allowed to," Kyuubi stated simply. He shrugged and added, "Of course, you could just wish for the knowledge. Wouldn't even cost much, either. A little knowledge hardly warrants something as weighty as giving up your soul, right, Sakura?"

The goddess gave the demon an odd look, seemed to consider it a moment and then nodded in agreement.

"And look on the bright side, jackass! Once you make that wish, we'll be out of your hair and you can go right back to your normal, boring little life," the demon continued, smirking. "So, what do you say?"

Sasuke was uncertain. He wanted them gone and he wanted to know what he had to do with some pocket universe, but what was the price he would have to pay? The fact that it would be less than a soul bore little comfort for him, since no religion had ever set fixed parameters to define the weight of a soul and he'd seen horror movies where one soul could be worth much more than many others combined.

Still...

"I wish I knew the village Konoha in the Land of Fire!"

The swirl shaped marking on Kyuubi's head glowed red hot as the demon gained an utterly malicious grin. "Wish granted."

Standing in a bloodstained, ruined field and clutching at the burning cursed seal, Sasuke wished he'd never heard of Konoha or the Land of Fire and wept for the perfect world he'd been cheated of.

AN: edited and fixed up a little. May re-write later.