The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 256: Out On The Lake

Chapter 256: Out On The Lake

Half an hour later, Kir met Kordia at the pier directly beneath the lowest-reaching tower beneath the promontory.

Waiting at a boat was Terry, Lumin’s butler, along with a device designed to display local mana flows.

"I think Lumin knows more than she lets on about spirits," Kordia said as soon as she saw the record player-sized device, which looked like a floating compass in a ball of energy, with a triangle-shaped indicator. "We should be able to follow this to any large sources of mana."

"Um... One problem though," Kir said, before giving Kordia a moment to notice the indicator was pointing right at her.

"Oh! Let me just..." She poked around the device, and the indicator wobbled away from her direction.

"I thought you might hide your mana instead," Kir said as he sat in the boat with her.

Terry took up the oars and started to row away from the pier in silence.

"I suppose that would work, but there’s really no point with me," Korida shrugged.

"Why do you say that?" Kir reached out and held her hand.

"My tails," Kordia said, fluffing out her three tails a little. "They pretty much tell people how much mana I can hold if they know about my clade." Amongst Beastkin, Clades were used to categorize and distinguish those with similar animalistic traits. Kordia was of the fox clade, or foxkin, which was pretty self-distinct and had few members, but others like the dog clade could contain a breadth of members under the category - in the same way that corgis and huskies were both dogs back on Earth.

"But that’s just for your total mana, right?" Kir asked. "What about your present mana level?"

"I guess learning mana suppression could help with that," Kordia sighed, looking out at the lake as they grew further away from Norneau.

Of course, mana suppression had a couple of downsides. Like getting challenged by people who couldn’t tell you were strong enough to need it. And occasionally needing to cut loose, so one didn’t get too used to suppression at one level and forget to adjust it when one’s capacity grew.

The subject was able to keep Kir and Kordia occupied for a few minutes, with Kordia asking if Kir could supervise her learning to suppress her mana on a weekly basis.

Terry was making unusually good distance for one birdkin rowing by himself. The butler resembled a shoebill, and his deadpan eyes stared into Kir’s as they met for a moment. Kir looked away and down, discovering that with each stroke, Terry was rowing them hard enough to fly over the smallest waves, somehow landing them smoothly enough that the boat barely rocked.

"That fucking stare... I need a smoke," Kiryu said.

"No." Kir kept his kiseru and box of tobacco lodged firmly in his storage.

Kordia cleared her throat. "I thought maybe we could talk a bit... now that it’s just us out here."

"Us and Terry," Kir said.

"True..." Kordia looked at Kir with sad eyes. "Never mind..."

Why was she sad? What was going on?

"Ah, the hearts of women are a mystery even I never understood," Kiryu said sagely. "Almost makes you wanna smoke..."

"Do you want to talk about it later?" Kir tried, ignoring his past life.

"Maybe," Kordia said, before returning her attention to the detection device between them, her tails twitching a bit in the wind.

It might not have been the right time to talk, given their company, but Kir still felt he needed to comfort his girlfriend.

With a bit of caution, he leaned forward, touching her lightly on the shoulder as he let his glamour down, revealing his true face and form, his angular face and horns, chiseled muscles everywhere his skin was exposed, and his fleshy tail, tapering into a prehensile, thin tip.

They kissed for a few moments, and thankfully Kiryu didn’t butt in.

A few short seconds after their kiss ended, there was a gentle tink as the indicator collided with the base of the magic device.

"Look’s like we’re over a large mana source," Kordia said. She closed her eyes for a moment. "It doesn’t feel like Nimfi or Keiya... but it’s a bit far away for me, and there’s a lot of water in the way."

"Is there a way I could bring it closer for you to confirm?" Kir asked.

"Well, if it’s an animal it probably won’t come close without bait. But if it’s a monster or spirit, we’d just need a lot of mana to - oh!"

"What’s ’oh’?" Kir asked.

"It’s heading this way. Fast."

Kir turned to Terry, "Row faster!"

The butler immediately sprang into high gear, just in time to get them out of the way of the whale-sized creature as it burst its way out of the water, screeching with its whole being.

The monster resembled a house-sized white flatworm but with tentacles and a throbbing red mouth full of vicious, conical teeth that sharpened to slightly clear, needle-like points that leaked purple venom from their tips. All along its body, pulsing veins of mana-corrupted blue led in random patterns in its flesh, and its eyeless face was crisscrossed with scars and pock-marks that had to have been from spells.

"An aboleth?!" Kordia cried out as soon as she saw it. "I thought they only lived in the ocean!"

Kir drew Kangetsu from his storage, transforming it into rifle form.

"Any specific weaknesses?"

"Well it’s water aspected, so fire is supposed to work if-"

Before she could finish her sentence, Kir clicked over to Bri-Kangetsu’s incendiary caster round. A slow charge would give him a flamethrower, but a fast charge sent a ball of flame flying at the center of the creature’s body where it rose above the surface.

It broke against it, steaming off something Kir had failed to notice, something that rapidly replenished itself.

"Huh. That didn’t work."

"Fire magic only works if you can get past its mucus layer!" Kordia said rapidly. "It takes a whole team casting spells continuously to keep the stuff off long enough to work!"

"Oh. Well then-"

Kir was about to take aim again when the boat was tossed in the air by a tentacle from below.

Rapidly stowing Kangetsu, Kir grabbed Kordia and deployed his wings. The boat landed upright, with a very annoyed-looking Terry rowing it away as fast as his feathered arms could pump the oars.

The aboleth launched tentacle after tentacle into the air, trying to snag its prey as Kir dodged and wove, his four angelic wings keeping him agile as he simultaneously dodged and fired fireball after fireball to dissuade the appendages.

"This thing definitely isn’t supposed to be here!" Kordia said as soon as Kir stabilized just out of reach.

"So no qualms if I go all out?" Kir asked as he disappeared Kangetsu into his storage.

"What does that even mean?" Kordia asked. "You mean that gun-thing wasn’t all out?"

Kir had barely introduced her to Kangetsu’s new form, and she’d gotten to try out a shot or two before deciding it wasn’t her kind of weapon - Kordia didn’t use weapons at all.

"Didn’t I mention it?" Kir asked. "Kangetsu only lets me use about a tenth of my power."

With a flex of his magic, Kir reached out.

Magic was the bridge between the real and the imagined. Power, free and available for any being with the mind to use it, and linked intrinsically to the presence of life.

With his magic, Kir wordlessly began to form a bubble of hardened air around the aboleth, slicing it into the lake and through reaching tentacles until it was completely encapsulated. Then he began to clench his fingers, imagining the incomparable pressure of a black hole as he compressed, and compressed...

Yet despite the mounting pressure, hard enough to force the water trapped with the aboleth to start freezing into ice-VI, the creature still writhed and thrashed, trying to dash its tentacles against the barrier that trapped it.

But crushing it wasn’t the only thing Kir was doing.

At the very beginning of his short-lived time as an Academy student, he’d demonstrated his "Air Crusher" to the gaping stares of the students around him. Since creating Bri-Kangetsu, however, he’d refined a new use for the technique. He wanted to keep hydrogen in too, but the filtering effect didn’t work if he tried, at least not at his current level of understanding.

Filtering out every element that wasn’t oxygen gave him a sphere of perfectly combustible gas.

And the only thing he needed now was a spark...

"Kordia, would you like to do the honors? Just a little fire or lightning," Kir tried to reassure her with his confidence.

"A little?" She raised a hand to the aboleth. Silvery fire gathered at her palm, before shooting out into the ball of air, growing red as it left her - which was an effect that happened whenever she created true fire using magic.

Kir opened a path for the fire, and a moment later he covered Kordia’s eyes, shutting his own, as a miniature sun burned in the sky for just a few moments, the cries of the aboleth lost in the concussion that finally shattered Kir’s Air Crusher.

Chunks of the monster started to rain down everywhere, but the core of the creature was an ashen smear that landed on the water along with the ice-VI, which exploded on contact with the lake, freezing out a patch of water dozens of meters in circumference.

As the mist parted, Kir landed with Kordia near the center of the patch, where a glowing mess of veins led to a single organ, what to Kir’s eyes resembled a stomach, mana-corrupted into a glowing crystal, and yet pliable enough that he was able to wrap the corrupted veins around it like a bundle before taking it under his arm.

"Don’t tell me you’re going to eat that thing," Kordia said as they made their way back to the boat, walking across the iceberg.

Kir shrugged. "Maybe just a little."

"You have to be the weirdest man in the history of everything," Kordia sighed as Kir broke off a bit of vein and tried it.

"Hmm. Mmm. Tastes like... S’mores."

"What’s a s’more?"