The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 240: Love Race - Downforce

Chapter 240: Love Race - Downforce

"Dodge left!"

Rain heard Cassiel call out and immediately reacted, pulling in his wings as he rolled as hard to the left as he could.

He was barely in time to escape the giant maw of a dragon as it tried to grab him.

For a moment as he spread his wings out, he thought he heard a disappointed "Tsk" from the rider. The dragons were all "bite safe" in the sense that each had something Cassie called "gum guards" installed over their finger-length teeth, but Rainier wasn’t about to go testing that safety.

Having missed his mark, the dragon rider continued on his path, trying to intercept some other hapless squad as Rain, Ozzy, and Cassie regrouped.

"Still think the obstacle course was harder?" Ozzy quipped with a smile.

"Tsk." Rain scoffed. The obstacle course had started off fairly conventional. Physical objects. Lots of rope. Enchanted logs that spun around in the air. Then things got weird. Illusions, subtle ones, had tripped up Rain. Walls that didn’t actually exist, invisible nets, winds that came from seemingly nowhere.

"I can’t see a way through," Cassie said, taking them in a zig-zagging pattern that was largely keeping them in the same place as she tried to find a way to break through.

But the worst thing had been the fact that there was no speedy way through it without leaving the course, it was a great-measures long chokepoint. This meant teams trying to both dodge the obstacles and each other as spells flew and tempers flared. But on the bright side, team Tenebris had used enough dirty tricks to let Team Roc finally catch up to the front four.

With how badly Rain had fared, Ozzy had performed frontrunner duties, often by blinding people with his flaring spells. This had severely annoyed the angels following their performance from the outside of the course, and more than once Rain had seen angry angels fiddling with their halos after Ozzy’s disruptions passed.

Ozzy had spent so much mana, however, that for this section, he’d largely relegated himself to purely physical flight techniques in order to conserve for the deep dive ahead.

Which meant it was Rain’s turn to take the lead.

Throughout the cylinder of space ahead of them, the dragons and their riders flew alone or in pairs, and even the lead squads were having trouble fending them off.

If a dragon grabbed someone, the rider would immediately steer a course for the edge of the course before having the dragon spit out their hapless victims. This meant squads had to fight for their teammates or at the very least cover their re-entry.

Rain could feel a solution somewhere in his mind. He watched, and felt the gazes of a half-dozen riders as the virtual wall of flesh and fire - these dragons were definitely of the firebreathing variety - tracked every flier, waiting to see who would try to break through next.

As he met the gaze of an angelic woman, he saw as she shifted her grip, tensing with the reigns around her left arm, ready to try to intercept him if he dodged through the shortest path. The problem wasn’t dodging one dragon, it was dodging the dragons that came after. The course was so narrow here that-

Wait!

"Cassie! I have a plan!" Rain said as, true to expectation, their flight path took them within range of the dragon rider whose eyes he’d met.

Cassie swore loudly as she tucked wings to drop below the dragon’s attempt at biting her out of the sky. "Just tell us what to do!" she shouted as she regained control to find another pair of dragons starting to zero in on them.

"We need to get as low as possible! Right down the middle!"

"Are you crazy?! They’ll dive us right out of the course!" Cassie flapped hard.

"Just trust me!" Rain said as he took the lead, reaching the bottom of the course, which glowed thanks to the navigation illusion imbedded in the headgear he’d been given.As he did so, he concentrated on forming just three of his Manifest Arms claymores, enlarging them to the size of tables.

"Grab on to the crossguards!" Rain shouted.

"I hope you know what you’re doing!" Cassie said as she thrust her hands forward to grab onto the crossguard.

"Flap as hard as you can! We need speed!" Rain said as he began to push his spell forward. It was a terrible risk. If a dragon got him, then all three of them would be out of the course. If a dragon even touched one of the swords, it was liable to break the spell...

But the only thing Rain needed his Manifest Arms for was its agility. As soon as everyone was going as fast as they could-

"Dragons incoming!" Ozzy shouted.

Sure enough, from above them, a pair of dragons was diving in for the kill. By all rights, they had every advantage. But Rain wasn’t about to let them have their way.

"Stow wings, now!" Rain shouted as he abruptly reabsorbed his.

Cassie and Ozzy followed just a second behind, and as soon as the dragons closed, he sent all three of his weapons zipping away faster than any angel in mid-flight could accomplish without breaking a wing.

The befuddled dragons almost collided and then spread apart as their targets were dragged away and in front of them, Rain taking everyone in an upward forward spiral that outpaced the ability of the dragons to turn.

With momentum on their side, Rain continued to skim the course until they came to the end. But a massive dragon guarded the space, flowing a wide circle that gave it complete coverage of where the course narrowed...

"GRWAAAR!" the roar hit Team Roc as a bursting cloud of flame began to burn its way toward them.

"Cassie, shield! Ozzy give me one flare on its far side!"

""On it!"" Rain’s teammates shouted.

The flames were easily redirected but the real danger was the dragon’s ability to stretch its neck into their path to potentially knock one of them out. Ozzy’s flare blinded the dragon’s left eye right before Team Roc zoomed past, Rain dropping Manifest Arms to let gravity take them into the course’s downturn.

As they fell, a second gout of flame followed them, the angry dragon disobeying its rider as it half-blindedly tried to roast them.

"Hahah!" Rain whooped before turning and deploying his wings.

As Team Roc sped ahead, behind them, three teams broke through the dragon lines mere moments after their success.

In a blaze of light and magic, an alliance of three teams from House Philia used Team Roc’s success to maximize their forceful breakthrough.

As they began to fall into formation to focus on taking out Team Roc, behind them came an orb of pure black, which burst in the middle of their formation.

Two teams lost their leads as the timing caused members to scatter, but one team had already raced ahead before, through the darkness, team Tenebris slid forth like hungering serpents.

There was short, spiraling path before the major drop, and as they entered it, Cassie looked up to find what their breakthrough had precipitated.

"Looks like we’ve got Malz behind us after some other guys," Cassie reported.

Ozzy smiled, "Angel, I take it you mean to make this an Eros-only lead?"

"You read my mind! Besides, now I can really cut loose."

Rain opened his mouth to remind her about the null-mana zone ahead, but abruptly shut it. As long as she didn’t go too crazy, it was likely her internal generation would more than compensate for the lack of ambient mana.

Since angels absorbed mana through their wings, one of the clear go-to tactics amongst racers had been to use broad attacks that were hard to dodge in the hopes of disrupting both an opponent’s flight and their mana generation capacity - which was critical in keeping up the level of bodily enhancement necessary for such hard flying.

In a surge of light, Cassie shifted into her magiform. "I’ll hit them at the end of the spiral," she said. The end of the spiral was the beginning of the dive into the null-mana zone.

Why would she-

It suddenly struck Rain that Cassie wanted to time her attack to give her opponents the chance to stop before the drop. It was a nice gesture, given how cutthroat the race had been so far, even if it ran completely counter to what their overall strategy was supposed to be.

Rain and Ozzy let her get a bit ahead, since she would need to slow to attack.

There were no branches for the dive, making it one big chokepoint, and so as she turned and started flying backward, Cassie eyed the spiraling teams, trying to pick out her targets. She began to chant.

"Oh light, become my hands..."

It was rare to see angels using chants, but as far as Rain could guess, Cassie was still working out her new spell, and the bit of poetry helped her consolidate her mind around around what she wished to accomplish.

"A hundred voices cry for mercy..."

A team from House Agape had managed to overtake Tenebris, and were doing battle with the frontrunners from House Philia.

"To them, I answer, with one hundred touches..."

None of that mattered as halo upon halo of light began to form around Cassiel, with glowing hands just like her "normal" ones forming in pairs.

"Go forth! Hecatoncheires Aegaeon!"

The two squads, still fighting each other as they rounded the bend, didn’t stand a chance as Cassiel’s hundred-handed attack descended upon them.

Everywhere they could be, the six fliers were gripped, their flight spoiled as they were slowed and then stopped, trapped in place even as each of their panicked strikes destroyed hand after hand. A moment after they were all suspended in midair, the hands brought them all together, cramming them into a ball that would make any escape even more difficult.

But the team behind them wasn’t Tenebris.

"Shit! It’s Jassiel!" Ozzy called out.

With his Elevated taking the lead in a line formation, Jassiel burst his way through the hands using a blast of green energy like the head of a destructive comet.

Rain heard him cackling as he passed over head, and for a moment he glimpsed in manasight the thin lines of power leading from the collars on the necks of his elevated and to into him.

Before Rain could fully process the sight, however, Cassie swore and turned away from her spell.

"Crap! We need to get after him!"

"Yes, angel!" Ozzy sounded off as he approached the drop, tucking his wings as Rain did the same.

The only thing left to do was dive.