The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 271: Cannot Be Mimicked

Chapter 271: Cannot Be Mimicked

As Kir flung water blade after water blade into the mimic, hoping it would reduce enough for him to find out where the people were taken, he started to notice something.

Every time a tentacle wrapped around him, Mimzy would quiver, his living clothes rejecting the touch of the mimic that was most likely her parent - with Stella technically being its mother, having been implanted with the egg.

It was as if Mimzy were saying "Mine! Don’t touch!" and Kir felt so grateful to not have his clothing betray him. Mimics were definitely solitary manavores, even against their own parents.

Kir still cut up those tentacles, not wanting them to get past him as the mimic switched from trying to grab him to trying to crush him.

Large, fleshier appendages hardened to mimic stonework pounded the pavement as Kir dodged and sliced. A single bad hit was all it took to break Kir’s physical shield, and with one hit, it crashed Kir into the stone wall of the house next door.

Kordia called out but Kir leaped from the crater before the mimic could make a followup strike.

How much mass does this thing have?

"Kir! It’s eating itself!" Kordia suddenly shouted.

True enough, the mimic was using the pause to begin retrieving the largest pieces Kir had severed, meaning as long as they remained he’d be subjecting himself to a perpetual stalemate.

"Start burning them!" Kir ordered, and soon tongues of silvery flame that faded to orange-red true fire blasted out from Kordia’s free hand, consuming the severed flesh to Kir’s right as he resumed the front and center position in front of the morphing house.

Soon the sounds of popping flesh and the smell of burnt octopus filled the air.

Realizing it was now losing pieces of itself, the mimic shrieked again, redoubling its efforts to bludgeon Kir.

It must know it’s too big to escape... it wants to eliminate witnesses.

Or perhaps it was just angry to be encountering Kir a second time, and he was overestimating its intelligence.

The first time, Kir had been its victim, until he started draining it back. He did not want to repeat that sort of intimate contact, because he needed to keep his glamour ring intact, every single layer of its hundred-plus spells, in order to stay unarrested in Norneau, since Heaven had already paid the city what amounted to a bounty for his death.

Hints from Lumin indicated that Heaven had a secret reputation for destroying whole kingdoms that displeased them, and he did not want to bring that wrath down on the city...

A sudden surge of light announced something that Kir was not expecting.

Between the eyes of the mimic, a bulge appeared, red and ominous.

Did this thing learn magic? A mimic that could also attack with magic would be a nightmare predator...

Seconds later, the welt exploded, showering the area and Kir with mimic giblets. Blasting out of that hole was Bailey, dragging an unconscious Hornstab.

"I can’t fly!" Bailey shouted.

"Kordia!"

"On it!"

Kordia switched from burning away mimic pieces to creating a ramp using a shield, which Bailey hopped onto and slid down, sacrificing his shoes as the mimic’s attempt to close the wound oozed over them.

"They’re on the upper floor," he gasped, clearly drained. "Fucker’s got them all in the walls."

Based on the closing wound, Bailey had also carved a long tunnel in the flesh, suggesting it was mostly solid on the inside.

Almost no one on their own could escape such a trap... Unless they were a succubus or had mana-draining aspects to their spells like Daisy... Wait. Daisy!

"Bailey, can you still run?"

"Yeah."

Kir dropped him an entire purse out of his storage. "Take that, use the bus if you can. Bribe her, threaten her, or whatever, just get Daisy down here."

"But-"

"Go! I promise to save your friend."

Covered in slime and looking exhausted, Bailey forced himself to his feet, dropping his friend and clutching the purse as he ran.

Moments later, a whistle sounded from above as the last person Kir wanted to help arrived.

"I should have known you were lying!" Michelle shouted as she landed. "Not an expert my foot!"

"We can discuss this later," Kir said. "Victims are kept on the second floor, somewhere behind the eyes. It eats its bits that fall off to regenerate, you need true fire to really burn it."

"I only make true fire!" Michelle said as she drove off a smallish tentacle with a burst of flame. The way she thrust her fists and feet reminded Kir of martial arts as she steadily worked her way around, burning both tentacles and severed portions as she fought her way closer, occasionally rocket-boosting herself faster to dodge particularly large tentacles as they rolled at her with chunks of pavement attached.

Kir knew her statement had to be a lie given her ability to fly. True fire would have probably burned her soles off by now.

More mundane guards showed up, but aside from the odd spell or arrow, which did nothing but feed it, the best they could do was keep bystanders from entering the area. Their only other service was to drag Stabhorn away and wrap the youth in a blanket.

Michelle’s proximity to the mimic meant no guards could approach. But as soon as she backed up to catch her breath, a guard ran up.

"Captain, we’ve got battlemages on the way and some adventurers asking how they can help."

"The victims are in the higher levels. Only let in those who can use true fire or creation skills, magic itself won’t harm it."

As more and more mages arrived, the amount of attacks pouring into the mimic increased, yet even so the thing clung to life.

One mage, who seemed to specialize in magnetism, created an impromptu iron cone before charging between the eyes of the mimic. He managed to come out with two victims, one a portly man whose appearance was exactly like the fake person from earlier, but with his skin an unhealthy, waxy color. The other was a boy dressed in rags.

"Can’t tell how many more are in there," the muscle man reported. "It’s all flesh, and I’m going to need a lot more iron."

He reached up, trying to extract the cone he’d left in the mimic, but failing as the thing regenerated.

Having lost four of its victims, the mimic finally grew enraged enough to shriek, only this time there was a rumbling as from below the already mangled culvert started to buckle and crack. Tentacles began to sprout from the ground.

"It’s in the ground!" Michelle shouted. The mimic had been tunneling under them the entire time they’d fought. If it escaped back into the sewers...

They’d been battling for half an hour at that point.

Daisy should be showing up any minute now... Assuming Bailey ran before catching the bus, then the most time it should have taken to return was three-quarters of an hour...

"Out of the fucking way, clods!" the familiar shriek of Daisy’s voice broke through Kir’s thoughts.

She was staring own from the side door of an open air carriage, and a large black ball of anti-magic was forming.

"Move!" Kir shouted to encourage the remaining mages, who looked up not knowing what was about to happen.

He hopped backward and out of the way as a wide-area blade of darkness consumed the space in front of the mimic, slicing down into the ground and simultaneously destroying all of the tentacles that had erupted earlier.

With manasight, Kir saw the stream of mana start to form along the path of the spell, but before it reached Daisy, the mana suddenly fell as the mimic reasserted its drain on the space around them.

"Fucker!" Daisy readied another guillotine blade, this time crosswise to the mimic...

"Daisy don’t! There are people in there!" Kir tried to shout up but it was too late, a moment later the guillotine fell, slicing the mimic into two unequal halves. As the house fell in two, it was the half on the right that revealed something Kir hadn’t expected to see...

A giant mana crystal, the size of a basketball, embedded toward the back of the mimic.

Even though the mimic immediately started pulling itself together, the left half of the roof fell away as Kir took the chance to separate that side, with Kordia pulling it away using magic on the inert flesh. The act left her with only one of her three flames, and that one was weak.

"That was fucking dangerous," Kordia said as mages rushed in to grab victims out of the wet, bloodless meat, run through with strange blue veins and unidentifiable, wirey organs.

Thankfully, no victim had been in the path of Daisy’s spell.

"I think... I think I have one more..." Daisy said, her voice clearly ragged. She depended on the draining properties of her magic to recharge, with her weakening mana generation rate.

"Just aim for the left! Take out as much of it as possible!" Kir shouted up, hoping she heard.

"I got... I got it..."

A black ball formed this time, and when it crashed down, the mimic shrieked in pain.

Kir waited for the exact moment Daisy’s magic disappeared to dash in, and he drew kangetsu for only one second before storing it. He carved away the re-exposed core, grabbing it before jumping backward and away from the mimic-

Only that’s not what happened.

As he tried to leap away, a thin line of flesh connected to his chest, leading straight into the now-empty heart of the massive abomination...

"What are you doing... Mimzy?"