The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 239: Interlude - Anko - Part 1

Chapter 239: Interlude - Anko - Part 1

"Hold still. Hold still my love," Janice said before a gnossinian began to carve into the scarred flesh of the demonkin who was strapped to the top of the stone table.

Anko winced and looked away as the team of demons moved in, the liquid reagents in their various containers offered up to the six-armed gnossinian as he finished his gruesome task, before stepping back and beginning to mix them as he focused his will and his mana into the bowl.

"Anko!" Janice suddenly snapped, causing her to jump.

"Yes Miss Janice?"

"Make your arms useful and wipe him down."

"Yes ma’am!" Anko jumped to the task, looking around before grabbing a towel with two of her four hands. She had to look around for a water source, but thankfully there was a tub of the stuff nearby and she hurried over to dampen the towel before returning to help the patient.

The man, delirious from drugs and pain, mumbled incoherently at the demonkin who held him by his one remaining arm as she gently stroked his hair.

As soon as he finished with his mixing, the doctor returned with the bowl held slightly away in two hands, as a third offered Janice a bite stick. She placed it into the demonkin’s mouth as the doctor placed his three remaining hands on the demonkin’s body, one at the head, one at the heart, and the last at the stomach.

"This will be quite painful for you, Mister Lucifer."

"Mmphf?"

With one fluid motion, the gnossinian doused the reinjured demonkin’s body in the liquid, which glowed slightly pink. Moments later he began to channel mana into his work, and Reis watched in fascinated horror as the demonkin’s arm began to regrow, his body healing everywhere he had been cut open.

He began to thrash against the straps holding him down, with Janice holding the bite stick into him until he butted his head into her stomach with his horns, sending her crashing backward.

"Miss Janice!"

"Hold his head!" she shouted.

Anko rushed in, grabbing the bite stick with two hands and holding his head with her lower ones as she struggled to dodge his horns.

After a grueling set of minutes, the working was done, and the demonkin passed out, his face matted with sweat and his body whole once more except for the wicked scars that separated his new flesh from the old.

Anko had asked how he got his scars, but Janice had shied away from revealing it. Something about the way she held herself told Anko that she was... ashamed? Miss Janice was hard to figure out.

"From here out, it should be possible to keep him asleep while he heals," the doctor said to Janice.

"How soon will he be able to-"

"Normally I would say a month, maybe more... but the primary reagent was far more potent than anticipated. My answer is uncertain, but we shall see."

"Can I, um, go now?" Anko asked, interjecting.

Janice cast her quick glare at the interruption before softening a little. "You did well, Anko. You are free from all but your training until I call on you again."

With a respectful nod, Anko left the room.

Her accommodations had improved a lot when Duke Maledict had stolen almost the entire Academy from her old home. It felt like a lifetime ago from when she was Nona, staring at the magical place from the outside, but now she was living in it, occupying a dorm room that came with magical showers and a bed and everything!

As soon as she was out of said magical shower and re-dressed, she opened her window to look out over the place everyone was starting to call Darkness. There still was no official name for the place, but people put a name to it all the same, perhaps to avoid the fear that they were nowhere.

The abandoned city next to which the Academy towers now housed all that was left of the Dukedom of Heresy, and thousands rescued in expeditions into Hell.

Looking out her window, Anko could see the constant lights of the slowly reviving city. Everywhere below was made of metal. She’d helped out for the first few weeks of her demonhood, exploring with teams, scraping together salvage and discovering places where there was actual dirt that the demons could use to make food.

The relative dearth of mana in the area had made most of the demons sluggish without eating, but those few demons who knew druidcraft and some of the captured Aytherians had managed to scrape by.

Then the Academy had been stolen, and now food was becoming steadily more plentiful. There was also mana in it, in quantities that had immediately refreshed every demon for miles around. Now, instead of just the most powerful demons and demonkin being active, the whole city was bustling about the business of survival.

Anko briefly considered going into the city to find something fun to do, but Janice had been unexpectedly generous in her dismissal. It got her thinking that maybe she could finally take the time to explore where nobody else was.

Nobody would miss Anko too badly if she skipped out on a day or two of training...

Two hours later, Anko was sprinting across the metal ground toward the place she really wanted to go to. A little place she’d found a week ago or so - time was really hard to tell when the only light came from the places where the Academy had been broken open to the core in order to provide it.

Her destination was a tower, sticking straight up out of the metal floor and up into the darkness, perhaps ten or so great measures from the Academy.

It had only become visible once the Academy had been broken open somewhat to shed its light, and she wanted to check it out before anyone else.

Closer to it, there were a few holes in the floor she had to watch out for, but one thing people had discovered when they tried to delve down was that the entirety of what lay beneath the metal parts was filled with darkness and wood.

It made Anko wonder if they had all been teleported into the base of one of the great world trees, not that she’d ever known how big such things could be.

The thought made sense to Anko because when she was littler she used to hide in trees all the time. But now she was... well, not all that little.

Her demonic transformation had made her body a shade under a measure and a half tall. Where once she had been spindly from starvation, her legs and arms - and now tail - had filled out a bit to give her a wiry, athletic appearance. The transformation had turned her hair a heavy purple, and her skin was now a darker shade of grey.

"Perfect for stealth," Maledict had chuckled once he saw how she’d turned out.

Anko had been sad she didn’t get wings, but she could live without it. After all, she’d discovered she had the next best thing: An aptitude for enhancement magic and a maven’s degree of fine control over the movements of her entire body.

The latter was considered pretty unremarkable by itself, but she’d been working very, very hard. As a result, she’d discovered that her mavenry basically made her some sort of "super-enhancer" when it came to how she used her limited enhancement abilities with mana.

It helped that she had a good teacher. Mr. Maledict had been quite supportive of her discovering her abilities and had even told Mr. Svarzgard how to teach her right after just one sparring session.

Svarzgard was a mean old demon who thought that the way to make people stronger was to push them around until they could figure out how to push back. Anko’s mavenry, however, didn’t give her much in the way of extra strength, though it did make her claws supernaturally tough. Svarzgard had made fun of her "silly little claws" right up to the point she’d cut off his bushy white hair with them.

Still, Maledict had seemed a little disappointed. Anko would never be a great mage, but as she approached the tower, she knew she could be the next best thing. An agile shadow to the man who had saved her; the man whose father had given her a new life.

And with four arms, she could definitely hold onto his sexy body, hee hee-

!

In her moment of distraction, Anko had stepped onto a plate near the base of the tower that immediately came loose, pivoting around some unseen anchor and dropping her into the darkness just measures away from her final destination.

"Ow. Ow..." Anko coughed as the dust settled around her. Instead of dropping into an abyss, it looked like she’d fallen only four measures or so.

After taking a few minutes to recover, Anko reached into her pack and pulled out a small magic tool. Feeding just a bit of her mana into it caused the orb on a stick to light up, and she held it up to take in her surroundings.

It was the end of a hallway, that much was certain, but based on the fact that there were a lot of doors leading from where she was standing, this might have been an important place.

Whatever it was, there was nothing but thick dust and rusted-out furnishing, just like in most of the underground. But what drew her eyes was the end of the hallway, the rounded wall jutting in with empty, rectangular frames where doors might have once stood. Stepping up, she looked inside to find an entirely empty shaft made of the same metal as the surface.

With her tiny light, she could only see darkness above and darkness below, but she smiled at the realization of what she’d discovered.

Anko had a way up.

The only thing left to do was climb.

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