The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 233: Long Forgotten

Chapter 233: Long Forgotten

Rainier sat on his bed, looking at his hands.

His godflesh-covered hands.

He had expected something to change about him, but not this. Not the parts that the angels had grafted onto him, to replace his lost arm. The godflesh that now occupied his entire torso, ending just above his knees.

Since then, he’d managed to crush a cup, snap his toothbrush, and bend his door handle just trying to manage his new strength.

Then there was the vision. The one he’d had...

He’d tried to argue against letting the others try, but first Ozzy and then Lute and Ed had undergone the treatment.

Ozzy came out with both arms covered to the shoulders, the godflesh wrapping just around his chest. Ozzy and Lute came out with opposite sides of their bodies covered down to the foot.

None of them had reported visions.

And no one knew what Rain had seen.

The only theory Malz had come up with was that Rain already had his godflesh enhanced when he was given wings. Thus, he was far more integrated with it, and had been pushed farther along.

He was still ruminating on his body when there was a knock at his door and Cassie pushed it open.

"Hey Rain, want to come out with us?"

"Us?" he asked.

Malz peeked in, "Hi Rain."

"Hi Malz," he gave a small smile. "Where are you going?" he asked.

"To the Galleria," Cassie said. "Malz wants to check a bookstore for anything that mentions that Helios guy."

"And I want to get some ice cream or something," Malz said.

Rain didn’t feel like ice cream, but he did feel like getting out of his room.

One long flight later, they landed at the Galleria.

"Alright. They know me at the bookstore but it’ll probably still take a while," Malz said. "How about you two go shopping? Maybe you can talk to him about that thing," she looked at Cassie expectantly.

"I think we should all be here for that," Cassie frowned. "Meet up for ice cream in an hour?"

"’Kay," Cassie waved before Malz disappeared into a stairwell leading down. Once Malz was gone, she started looking up at all the shops.

Rain was left wondering what "that" could mean. He waited patiently for Cassie to pick a shop to go to, but to his surprise, she asked, "Where would you like to go?"

"Me? Oh, uh..." Rain scratched the back of his head as he looked around. He settled on the first thing that caught his eye. "How about that halo smith?"

One short flight and were inside the shop.

It was smaller on the inside than Rain had anticipated, but perhaps they created the halos in a back room.

Almost as soon as they entered, an angel approached. "How may I help you, miss?" she asked.

"My friend wanted to look at the halos," she gestured up at Rainier.

"Your friend," the clerk raised an eyebrow as if such a statement were somehow off. "Feel free to browse then. I will be nearby if you have questions." She smiled at Cassie and then stood off to the side.

Inside the shop, there was music playing from some unknown source, and some of the haloes pulsed to it.

A lot of them seemed to just be glowing rings, while others were floating pairs of rings with words circling between them. Some were twisted, and some were made of little bits that followed the same path or even different swirling patterns.

It really stretched his idea of what halos could be.

There were no metal ones though, like the one he had inherited.

Finally, he figured out what he wanted to ask.

"Excuse me, miss..."

"You may address me as Vanessiel," the clerk said, her chin raised at him.

"Miss Vanessiel," Rain restarted, "Do you have a halo that can manifest divine arms?"

"Divine... arms?"

How could she not know about divine arms? "Black weapons. They’re used to punish evildoers..."

"We don’t sell weaponized haloes here. This is an atelier for people wanting something trendy and artful."

"Oh. Um. May I speak to the smith who makes these?" Rain asked, looking towards the back.

"These aren’t made here. You’ll have to go to the Maker’s District and find whichever factory in the Choir of Creation produces them," she spoke in a very matter-of-fact tone.

"Oh... Do any of these do anything special?" Rain asked next.

The clerk looked at him like he was wasting her time. "They do what you see," she said. "And are very mana-efficient."

"They don’t store mana?" Rain asked. He’d learned that in Heaven they had haloes that did that, serving as a small pool of extra mana instead of a drain that was primarily for show.

"No, why would they?" She turned to Cassiel, her tone shifting completely to a friendly one. "Would you like to pick something for your servant? He doesn’t seem to know what fashion is."

Rain knew he was being insulted. Vanessiel’s interactions had all seemed unwilling and hostile. Maybe she was just having a bad day. But she had to be friendly to a fellow angel, while she could be more honest with him. He could relate to that.

The two girls walked away and Vanessiel came back holding a floaty little halo of separate, deeply orange crystals shaped like four-pointed stars. It stayed in perfect formation no matter how it was moved.

"These will look lovely with his blue hair. Will this be all?" Vanessiel asked as she handed the small plastic box over for Rain to hold.

"Yes," Cassie said. "Rain, will you please wait outside?"

Without thinking, Rain obeyed, only to get stopped at the door as a shield went up and the shop’s lights changed to red.

"Shit. So sorry about that," Cassiel said quickly.

"It happens infrequently," Vanessa replied before flinging some mana to a certain corner of the room. A moment later the alarm shut off and Rain was left standing at the entrance as a pair of angels descended.

The two male angels were wearing identical uniforms of blue cloth shirts with black pants. A badge of office was over each of their hearts, and both bore truncheons.

"Is everything alright?" the one on the left asked Vanessa as the one on the right lifted his truncheon out of its ring, transforming it into a long catchpole that he held at the ready.

"It’s fine," Vanessa said, then turned to Cassiel. "Miss, you’ll need to-"

"Yes, I know," Cassie was furiously red as she walked up to Rainier and took the box from him, before walking out the entrance.

The guards, seeing this, gave Cassie respectful nods of the head before turning to depart.

Cassie floated down to the first floor and handed Rain the box as soon as he landed next to her.

"Ugh! That was so embarrassing," she held her forehead. "That clerk was such a bitch!"

Rain felt a little surge of happiness at Cassie’s indignation. "I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to act in there..."

"You did nothing wrong," Cassie said. "I’m the one who forgot things..."

From then on, Cassie took the lead when visiting the shops Rain was interested in.

Not all of the clerks were disrespectful, and at the shop for Aytherian curios, the clerk even shook his hand. It was a light enough handshake to feel gimmicky, but still, the sentiment was nice even if all the swords turned out to be "dulled for safety" and made of softer stainless steel.

Rain came away from that shop with a hand-sized white horn that had been etched with a landscape of Norneau from above the lake, and Cassie carried out a staff made of polished redwood, supposedly created from a branch taken from the Forest of Titans.

All in all, Rain came away feeling a bit better than when he’d arrived, and he kept both of his gifts from Cassie at his side as he sat with her in the Galleria’s eating area.

After a few minutes of Cassie making him try on the halo - and telling him all sorts of things about how well the orange complimented his blue hair - Malz arrived with a giant tome held in both hands, which she slapped onto the table.

"Oh wow," Cassie said. "I take it you found something?"

"Barely anything, but maybe there’s more hidden somewhere else," Malz replied.

Rainier winced, the book looked old-old. Liable to fall apart if treated roughly.

But when she opened the cover, the pages inside were pristine white under the text, even at the edges.

"How much did you pay for that?" Cassie asked.

"More than I’d have liked. But at least the pictures are neat."

Rain’s skill at reading Angelic had improved a little, but he still wasn’t able to read it upside down.

"Here’s our god," Malz announced as she came to a pair of pages, which had a depiction of an angelic man being ripped limb from limb. There was a single line of text underneath the art.

Malz shifted the book over as Cassie scooted closer.

Cassie read, "Helios, punished for his hubris. For the near-destruction of heaven, the Choir Gods decreed an unending harvest, fertilizing the world trees with his limbs. May he be forgotten..."

"Yeah, they went really hard back then, it seems," Malz said. "But check this out." She flipped to closer to the back of the book, where one page was taken up entirely by a black mural with purple eyes, hints of a man-like form barely discernable in the darkness. She read, "Shinigami Giryu, whose release would mean the end of Heaven. The demons are his spawn, the metatron, his heralds. The Choir Gods curse his name and all who speak it."

"Who are the Choir Gods?" Cassie asked.

"We call them the ’Foundation Gods’ now," Malz replied. "Aidaeb’s children."

"Shinigami... You mean Shin-gir?" Rain asked.

"Yeah, gods get lots of names," Malz shrugged. "Anyway, the title is The Book of Dead Gods, and it’s older than sin, according to the old guy who runs the shop. So this is just a copy of a copy of a copy but with the original cover. There’s a lot more dead gods than I thought there were." She browsed back a few pages to the depiction of a white-haired, one-winged angel holding a ridiculously long sword.

"So," Cassie rapped out a small beat on the table. "Are we ready to talk about the thing?"

"Oh. I thought we’d get ice cream first," Malz said, closing the book.

They both looked at Rain. "I’m fine doing it now," he said, wondering what he was getting into.

Cassie started them off. "So, Malz and I were talking..."

"And we thought what you said about your relationships on Ayther was pretty interesting..."

Rain tensed.

"So we want to try it. Sharing you, at least."

Rain found himself blinking very, very rapidly in surprise.

Rain had imagined that if he ever tried for something like what he had back on Ayther, it would be him initiating. "Wh-what? I thought we were keeping things professional..."

"That’s no reason we can’t have fun," Cassie said. "It’ll just be... like friendship. With benefits. No strings attached."

Rain looked at Malz. ""We can do a trial run tonight. I’m actually the one who suggested it... we kind of had a moment of radical honesty..."

"You don’t have to if you want to, but I have noticed you’re way easier to fluster when you’re all... pent up."

Malz hid a smile, looking at Rainier’s red face.

"So how about it?"

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.