The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 122: Volume 2 - Epilogue

Chapter 122: Volume 2 - Epilogue

Rainier flexed the fingers of his new hand.

Despite what he’d been assured, there was a strange gap between the actions he’d wanted to perform and how the arm moved.

It was concerning. As was the pale flesh, the golden bands and angled lines that decorated the flesh were not what he imagined when they said there would be "aesthetic differences."

It was not, in other words, his arm.

A slight hiss was all the warning he received when the door to the room slid open, and an angel entered.

"Good morning, Rainier," she greeted.

"Good morning, Anzelika," he greeted back, putting on a slight smile.

"How is your arm feeling this morning?" She asked the same question every day, raising the strange rectangle of metal that she tapped notes into.

"It feels better than yesterday, but..." he explained the gap between his thoughts and the arm’s movements, "... and there’s also a gap between touching and feeling."

"That is within expectations. You’re doing quite well, in fact. Not many could have adjusted to a godflesh conversion as well as you have. Continue to drink your medication at the prescribed intervals and your integration should progress."

She smiled with a tilt of her head. An insincere smile meant only to convey an assumable level of actual caring... Rainier knew it well. He was something of an expert on smiling.

He returned a smile that spoke of great appreciation, careful to control his cheek muscles to make sure it reached his eyes.

As usual, she left him a bottle of glowing, yellow liquid and waited silently as he held it in his real hand, carefully unstoppering it and drinking the contents.

It looked like liquid sunlight, but on the way down it felt cold and slightly cloying. A moment later, his body filled with the familiar pain. The crawling, spiking, tunneling pain like his flesh was reaching into the godflesh arm attached to his shoulder, and that it was reaching back.

It lasted about a minute and left him sweating and panting.

"You’re doing so well, Rainier," the angel said, collecting the bottle. Then she turned and left, the door hissing behind her.

Rain finally let himself shudder as soon as she was gone. Coming to Heaven was supposed to be... Well... Heavenly. Yet it felt alien to him.

Everything - absolutely everything - functioned off mana. And there was a featureless aesthetic underlying what he eventually realized were illusions that needed manasight to be seen.

He had to keep it on all the time, and while it was becoming second-nature to him now, it had caused him no end of migraines just trying to open doors for the bathroom.

He’d outright missed his first day of rehabilitation because he hadn’t known how to find the right door, and so he’d wandered a seemingly featureless hallway only to discover that there had been a dozen doors labeled in manasight illusions.

"Why did they pick me?" he wondered. Why give him a new right arm, only to make it from whatever "godflesh" was? Why not just regrow his arm and let him be? Sure, his parents had leveraged their connections to get him this far, but why had he drawn enough attention to be "improved" instead of simply healed?

Unable to think his way free of his anxieties, Rain decided to take a walk.

He’d been doing a lot of that lately, in between sleep and rehabilitation. Trying to see as much of Araqlun as he could. Wandering on foot, while most angels simply flew above or took air carriages the size of small houses.

The only reason any angel had to come to the ground was to investigate why he, a "half-mortal" was walking around.

Today, he didn’t even get out of the lobby before an angel stopped him to ask, "Mr. Eros, where are you going?"

It was the desk clerk, who sat at a desk of jet-black stone that glowed with illusions a fingernail’s thickness above the surface. He was a wispy fellow, skinny like Kir but utterly fragile-seeming compared to Kir’s wiry strength. And his hair was a pale purple, an odd contrast to his orange eyes.

"I was going to go for a walk," Rain said.

"You can’t. I have a visitor for you in two hours," the man said.

"Can’t? But it’s two hours," Rain raised an eyebrow. "I can be back before then."

"Let me rephrase that," the angel huffed, "This is a visitor who requires your presence. This means that if you go out there and disappear, I-will-lose-my-job." They tapped their palm with the blade of their hand.

"What am I supposed to do then?" Rain asked.

"Wait in your room. Practice your physical therapy. Play a game on your bed console."

"Those games hurt my eyes," Rain said. Following the tiny little characters, the strange little sounds that followed every move and action... it hardly felt like play to Rain. More like some sort of strange torture device where he put himself through the task.

It didn’t help that all the text was in Angelic script, which he couldn’t read. It had taken him hours just to get out of the first "level," only to be confronted with another one. According to the nurse who’d taken some time to teach him the basics, there were infinitely iterative levels, which felt insane. It was like putting himself through an endless flat dungeon that made his eyes hurt and induced anxiety.

"Is there a place where I can swing a sword or something?" Rain tried.

The angel blanched. "Absolutely not! You’re in recovery."

"Can you at least tell me who it is I’m supposed to meet in two hours?" Rain asked, figuring he could mentally prepare himself while doing his rehabilitation exercises.

"I can’t say," the angel replied.

"You don’t know?"

"It’s a visit from a seraphim, that’s all I know. Far above my pay grade to say, even if I did have a name," he huffed. "Now please, return to your room."

Rain returned to his room.

He took five minutes to try to figure out the window again, poking at the illusions until the "screen" showed him the outside of the hospital. It seemed like he was looking out of glass, but when he poked it, he felt the smooth, hard stone of the wall through the illusion.

Why did everything in Heaven have to be so complicated and weird?

"It would help if I could learn Angelic," he puffed out a breath.

So far he’d figured out the symbols for "On" and "Off" and "Exit," which was surprisingly helpful in most situations - if those situations were entering an unlit room that didn’t light itself, trying to leave a building, and exiting a lit room that didn’t... un-light itself? Rain had overheard a nurse complaining about someone leaving all the lights on, and he assumed she was talking about him.

Heaven was supposed to be heavenly... but it was just...

Frustrating.

Rain touched his arm - his real arm - with the godflesh prosthetic. After about three heartbeats he felt the sweat-salt on it, the slight grime that somehow felt more real than the entirety of Araqlun that he’d seen.

He made up his mind.

In an act of rebellion that would have made Kordia cringe, Rain went to the space next to his bed...

... and started doing pushups.

He’d been forbidden from doing anything so "extreme" as actual training. The exercises they had him rehabilitating his body with were so inane and small that he’d stopped feeling anything from them after three weeks.

Pumping himself up and down, he worked his arms without any particular quantity in mind. Just going and going until he started to feel his left and right arms start to line up in their exertions.

And then he went beyond.

Around the hundred-pushup mark, he started to feel the lag again... but not in his godflesh arm. That arm remained untired, completely fresh, while the rest of his body began to shudder and strain.

He stopped at one-hundred-eleven pushups. A ’nice numerical conjunction’ which was a phrase he thought he’d heard from either Kir or Kordia at some point.

Rolling to a seat, he stared at his hands, opening and closing them and seeing - actually seeing - that they were far more closely aligned in movements than before. He went for another set. Then another.

Over an hour later, he let out a short, relieved laugh.

This is what I needed!

Deciding to give his arms a rest, he started on crunches next, relishing the feeling of burning off the weight he’d put on since returning from the dungeon...

The dungeon where he’d failed to rescue Kir...

Where he’d almost gotten Kordia killed...

Those thoughts, those memories, fueled a part of Rain that he hated.

He poured that energy into his exertions. Crunches, short hops, more pushups...

He was drenched in sweat by the time the nurse arrived with his second dose of medicine, and she gaped in horror.

"Mr. Eros! You are not to be exerting yourself like this!"

Rain felt it when he didn’t smile. The absence of meeting what was expected of him.

He was tired of this. Tired of laying around doing nothing.

Of dwelling on how he’d failed the people he cared about.

Of how he’d likely driven his family into Heaven’s debt, without knowing anything about what would be expected of them.

Of all the Heaven’s-damned rules.

He had just opened his mouth to tell her, diplomatically, that he was quite frustrated, when an angel walked in behind her.

The nurse immediately turned, stepping out of the way.

"I apologize, High Seraphim-" she started to say with a deep bow.

"Do not worry," the man behind her said, smiling beneficently. "One must forgive the youth their little rebellions."

At first, Rainier was a little confused. The man in front of him inspired a strong sense of familiarity despite their never having met before. He had flame-red hair and wings to match, and a moment later Rain realized that this angel greatly resembled Kir.

The look in his blue eyes gave no opening to ask questions, and a moment later he turned to Rainier.

"I have heard that you are to thank for revealing the abomination to us," he smiled. "My name is Vinam Victoriam, and I’m very much looking forward to working with you, young one."

Rain swallowed. So this was the price for telling the truth... His mouth felt dry as he replied, "I’m Rainier Eros... I’m... looking forward to working for you as well..."

Behind Vinam, Anzelika was mouthing something that made her mouth very round.

A moment, later, Rainier realized he was too late when the seraphim said, "It is customary to bow in the presence of one’s superiors."

"Yes, High Seraphim."

He bowed.

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