The issue there was that the installation booted into what looked like a recovery installation(after showing the failure message). I had all the same options I did booting from the USB with the exception of "Reinstall[ing] OSX" instead of "Install[ing] OSX" this apparent similarity lead me to believe I was booting from the USB and not the hard drive.
It seems like disk utility refused to erase the drive it was running on(for obvious reasons) and the error message it threw("unable to access device") seems non-descript for the actual error.
Nevertheless, repartitioning the drive(correctly) and putting OSX first seems to have fixed the issue. It's now booted into setup and I can continue my endeavor.
I thank you for your help. Hopefully I will not need it again.
