The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 139: A Demonic Mess

Chapter 139: A Demonic Mess

"How may I serve?" the General Sreev asked.

Such a simple question, but one that carried many, many potential pitfalls.

Kir looked to his companions to buy himself a little time. Everyone was looking just a little ragged around the edges, except for Stella. Then he looked down at his shirt. "Perhaps a place to rest... and some refreshments."

"Of course," the General said, then turned back to his officers. In short order, he called up a captain, giving her instructions to see Kir and his group to the mess tent. Then he turned back to Kir. "I must coordinate the battle, young Master. But I will join you once I have transferred my duties to another."

Kir returned his small bow and followed the Captain into a tent that was identical to the command tent but closed. The tent was very clean and devoid of anything but tables and chairs of widely varying sizes. By Kir’s guess it was maybe three measures tall and thirty across. Shortly, everyone was seated at a long rectangular table, with the Captain hovering at Kir’s shoulder.

Now that Kir got a good look at her, she was short enough that he was taller than her while seated. She had a gnossinian’s lanky arms but much rounder features. Curiously, hair seemed to grow out of the two horns on her head, and she had a ridge of horns down the center of her forehead leading back below her neckline.

As Kir looked at her, her head bobbed back and forth from its attentive position before she finally maintained eye contact.

"Hi... I’m Litty... Captain Litty," she said. "Not sure if you heard while Sreev was giving me orders..."

To Kir she immediately seemed like someone who liked to fill silences.

"I’m Kir," he replied.

"I heard... I mean, the whole tent heard... So Maledict really had a, um. You look like him. I mean." Litty grew more flustered. "I’m sorry, I’m just... a huge fan of your father..."

Her being a fan was not what Kir had expected to hear. "Would you like to sit?" he offered.

"After you bring us food!" Amarena interjected, crossing her arms grumpily.

"Oh! Yes! Refreshments! One moment!" Litty turned and hurried off.

As soon as she was gone, Amarena leaned forward onto her elbows and whispered. "I do not like this one bit."

"Weren’t you the one who said you would escort us into your mother’s army if this were it?" Kir shot back.

"I have guaranteed authority in Leviathan’s army. Yet you are clearly an unknown here," she countered.

"Not entirely," Kir sat back and crossed his arms, his tail flicking angrily behind him. "General Sreev seemed to know who I was."

"And the first thing he did was activate your Forbidding," Amarena scowled. "Hard enough that I would bet for Kangetsu that Maledict knows you are here."

"I thought you didn’t know much about magic."

"I know about oaths, Heresy-Son. Oaths are older than magic. An oath is why I am still here instead of taking your head back to Hell as merit to my strength."

The table collectively grimaced at the statement.

"Well since we’re getting homicidal... what oath? Why stick around if all you need is my head as a merit badge?" She’d helped with the slavers, that was true, and everyone had just sort of accepted her company, but now Kir was determined to bring the question to a head.

"Because I believe you can make me stronger, at least until I find a Valrian to train me. I am oath-bound to grow my strength. It is almost the same as a Forbidding, and it... keeps me from certain weaknesses." She replied cooly.

"Is that why you’re so eager to fight me?" Kir asked.

"No. That’s just because your face pisses me off only slightly less than your father’s."

"You and Maledict have a history?" Kir raised an eyebrow.

"He abducted and dropped me through a portal, abandoning me on Ayther. And he didn’t even have the guts to make it a proper fight," she said coldly.

Stella opened her mouth and Kir shot her a silencing look. To which she rolled her eyes and made an exaggerated face, sticking out her tongue.

Coughing loudly, Kir was not about to bring up that topic, he continued, "That sounds like him." He wondered why Maledict hadn’t shown up, especially with the Forbidding going off twice.

"Here we are!" Litty said, returning with a big tray of meat.

As she scooted in to set down the tray, Kir lost himself in thought.

When a minion of Maledict’s had first attacked Kir, the Forbidding had stopped the demonkin merchant from attacking. Then Maledict had shown up within moments, challenging Kir to execute the man. Kir had done so, saving a street urchin named Nona. It was also how he and Stella met, when Maledict transferred the merchant’s holdings to Kir and dropped him through a portal into the dead man’s shop.

But here Kir was, surrounded by an army of Maledict’s people, and his father was nowhere to be seen. Part of Kir had dreaded what might happen if Maledict were here, but not wanting to kill the scouts once they stood down and not knowing what was going on had seemed to make the risk worth it. That, and the prospect of talking his father out of the siege.

The battlefield he’d seen was actually clean. No demons at the walls, no field of corpses between the front lines and the city. Just a lot of magic and missiles being thrown around. It was almost like they were intentionally holding back.

Then again, Kir had never seen warfare since his rebirth in this world. Perhaps this was just how things were done.

"Forks or claws?" Litty asked. Noir poked Kir in the side for his attention.

"Oh. Forks for everyone, please," Kir said, even though Amarena had already grabbed a hunk of meat by the bone - which looked big enough to be a femur - and started biting into it.

As Litty departed once more, Noir quickly asked, "Are we staying here? What’s the plan?"

"I’ll try to get us into Norneau as soon as possible," Kir whispered back.

"Good, because I am not cut out to be a sacrificial lamb..." he stared in horror at what was clearly a cooked lamb’s head. Possibly braised, just like most of the meat seemed possibly cooked through.

Litty as gone and back too fast for much conversation to occur. "There we go~" she said in a little singsong as she doled out the silverware, which looked like little spiky tridents. "I think the General wanted me to help because I’m a bit of an expert on food," she beamed. "Now, if you aren’t familiar with meat," she looked at Stella and halfway at Kir, "That’s lamb-" Noir gulped. "That’s cow. That’s bird. And that is, umm, cat." She pointed at four quadrants of the dish, which now made more sense to look at.

"What’s with the flavor of this cow?" Amarena asked, with a slight tilt of her head to verify she’d taken it from the correct quadrant.

"Oh, those are called spices," she beamed. "We captured a ship and some of the Aytherians said they’d show us how to use them if we spared them and their families." She clapped her hands together. "I got to direct the study."

Kir coughed around a small piece of unidentified bird. The meat was actually good, but it was the casualness with which Litty had said something so evil-sounding that threw him.

"Is it not to your liking?" she asked.

"Did you-?" Kir thumped his chest a bit.

"Did I what? Oh no, did someone use too much pepper again?"

"No..." Kir cleared his throat. "Did you spare them?"

Litty gestured enthusiastically as she spoke. "Of course. I mean, we took their stuff and sent them walking back to the city. You can see the shipwreck from the front lines. Oh but not their warriors. Well, they didn’t really have warriors... more like one mage and he got right out of there before we took the ship." She laughed nervously. "First mission I got to coordinate..."

"Sounds like a blast," Stella said without much feeling, before a flash of inspiration rose in her eyes and she reached, rotating the plate. "Hey Kir, you like eating cat, right?" She hadn’t touched any of the meat, but she had a big grin on her face.

Noir, meanwhile, was staring more directly into the horror of the eyeless sockets of the sheep skull, and Kir reached over to pull it off the tray and set it aside as he answered, "Stella, now’s not the best time for jokes."

"What joke?" Stella’s smile widened. "Our food expert hasn’t even learned that Aytherians don’t call their meat by the animal it’s from. I don’t even eat and I know ’cow’ meat is beef, ’lamb’ is mutton, and bird is... What is bird anyway?"

"Oh! I think they called them crows!" Litty added enthusiastically. Then, to Kir’s horror, "What do they call cat meat?"

Stella’s grin widened. "They call it-"

"Excuse our late arrival," General Sreev announced himself as he entered the tent, then saw the situation. "Did I interrupt?"

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