The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 274: Golden Grave

Chapter 274: Golden Grave

"Why would they abandon this place?" "What were those words you spoke at the door?" "When did you learn to speak one of the ancient languages?" Malz’s questions were rapid and overwhelming.

"It’s all from the vision I told you about. The one with Helios. I think... I think that’s him," Rain pointed at the pile of dust on the table.

"Do you know what these are?" Cassie asked, indicating one of the many control panels that lined the upper edge of the room.

Rain went to her, looking at the section of smooth, dusty glass. There were gold filaments here too. "Let me see," Rain said, reaching out to brush away the filaments and dust so he could expose what was beneath.

But as soon as he touched the filament, he felt a slight sensation like pain as it reared up, jabbing itself into the gold lines of his godflesh arm.

Suddenly Rain was on his back, staring up into a glaring white light.

"I tried to stop her!" Helios shouted.

"Enough lies! You wasted your time slaughtering the mensch instead of properly securing the singularity. Instead of rescuing the Metatron."

"Depriving her of mana should have been enough!" Helios tried to move, but his wrists and ankles were held to the table by black bonds, depriving his godflesh armor of strength.

"Fool," another voice said, belonging to a grim-faced woman. "You should never underestimate a Nasumi, even a clone."

"And speaking of clones, what do we do with the rest of the blanks?" A younger, slightly more nasally voice asked from out of view.

"Give them the first half of the memory package and figure out something to keep them loyal. We can put them to work cleaning, or reorganizing the physical archives; I don’t care. We need to prioritize getting the city and the access network back up and running, so we can take control of the narrative before even our loyalists turn on us. We can leave this failure here to rot in the dark."

Yes! That’s it! If they left Helios alone, he could figure something out. Anti-mana bands couldn’t last forever without a source... if he just abandoned his armor, or suppressed his mana enough...

"I need some of his biodata to reroute the power," a more distant voice reported. "I think we can at least get enough power for the access network and air condensers if we depower the security systems. Especially the asteroid breaker."

"How much biodata?"

"Just a hand scan."

Yes! They’d have to release him if they wanted to reroute power from Security-

Pain flashed, the sensation of sawing metal at his right shoulder. It lasted for moments. It lasted forever.

"Kill the shoulder. We only need one arm."

Helios felt a new kind of pain, a searing, needling cold that ripped away part of his soul.

An angel with blue wings stood over him, a sword of gold wreathed in black. Her face was cruel.

"You thought I couldn’t hear your thoughts, Henry? You’re going to die here. So you can abandon any hope we’ll suddenly become fools just because we have you. This, your little house of power, is your tomb."

The voice from before called out, "I’m in." They must have thrown them the arm...

One of the others called out, "Don’t depower the blast door or that panel. The last thing we need is to lock ourselves in."

Pain flared anew.

"What are you doing?"

"He doesn’t need the other arm. We should make absolutely sure he can’t figure a way out."

"Might as well take the legs at that point," a woman snorted.

Through the pain, rage began to boil in Helios. He needed to do something... to say something before the end...

"You ungrateful scum... You were nobodies before me. Nothing but a bunch of children in a choir, singing whatever tune the Metatron wanted- Ahh!"

He screamed as one of them jammed a knife into his leg, remembering they’d turned off his pain inhibitors.

"Here," the voice of the woman cutting off his arm said. "We might need it."

"I’m not carrying that. Just take the hand. I’ll inject a stasis capsule."

A grim-faced man stood from the opposite head of the table, approaching. As his pain cleared, Helios was forced to look at her, grabbed by the hair from behind. He didn’t know the names of half the people in the room, but he knew this woman. Had worked with her for years before they went down separate paths.

"So now you want to talk, Victoria?" Helios spat.

"You’re my brother, Henry. I didn’t want it to come to this, but you were impatient."

"The Prime Aiko was going to expose us. The Metatron would have destroyed us for wanting to abandon the project."

"And thanks to you, we are all but destroyed. Pray we survive long enough to find an efficient way of dealing with them, brother. The memory of your name, even as the worst amongst us, will depend on it."

Victoria drew a knife, holding it over Helios like the Sword of Damocles.

"Any last words?"

The pain of having his leg butchered staggered Helios’ voice. "There is... a special hell... for traitors like y-"

The knife fell, Helios began to choke as it passed through the back palate of his throat, severing his spinal cord.

The last thing Victoria said to him, before his consciousness died, were words that haunted Rain as the vision ended.

"Heaven will be what we make it... without you."

Gasping back into reality, Rain braced himself against the panel, sweat dripping down to wash small craters of dust from the glassy surface, which was dimly lit below the dust.

Both Cassie and Malz were next to him.

"Rain? Are you back?" Cassie asked, her voice full of concern.

"What happened?" he croaked, feeling as if his mouth was just as dry and dusty as this tomb.

"As soon as you touched the filaments, all of the ones in the room just... flowed into you," Cassie said. "Then this thing lit up, but it dimmed after you stopped moving."

"I saw it... I saw what happened when Helios died... It was right there..." He pointed at the inner head of the table.

Malz and Cassie waited as Rain told them everything he experienced.

"They just... dismembered him. Alive..." Cassie was horrified.

"I know who Victoria is," Malz said. "She’s the origin of the Choir of Victory, the founder of house Victoriam. Heaven’s First Daughter."

"How do you just know her if Helios was so hard to find?" Cassie asked.

"Because there’s a freaking statue of her in House Victoriam’s front yard. Not to mention how often their leadership squawks about her." She sighed, a little huskily, holding her forehead. "I think we found our storage place... and it’s right next door to the Black Tower."

"I don’t like the idea of messing around on top of the Capitol Tower though," Cassie said.

"Look at all this dust. No one comes up here. It’s perfect. And if what Rain said is true, I think this "Access Network" might be a precursor to Akash. Imagine what we can find if there are files. I might even find lost members of House Memoria!"

"Angels of that era don’t sound very pleasant to deal with," Cassie warned.

As the girls talked behind him, Rain swept a hand across the dusty panel. All traces of the gold filaments had disappeared. As he did, the panel lit up, lighting a panel touch-display he understood without ever having learned the ancient language himself...

He tapped a finger into the button that read "Power."

A display of the tower rose up, as well as a line at the bottom that had lines leading up to different categories of buildings.

The tower they were standing in took up 4% of the city’s energy. The line at the bottom listed "Registered Structures - 43%" and "Unregistered Structures" at 53%. Rain tapped into the Registered Structures subscreen. The Black Tower alone - labeled "Security" took up a massive 90% of the power for Registered Structures. And when he looked at the total energy of the city...

Rain realized that everything about Araqlun, the very core of Angelic power and civilization, was running at a mere tenth of its total mana capacity.

Just how much power does this city need?

A flashing yellow light drew Rain’s attention and he tapped it on instinct.

The display changed, the top part indicating the city, labeled "Araqlun Habitation Attachment" with a long downward line leading to a hemisphere. Oddly, a wide line to the right of the line read "Raqi’a Caretaker Operations," and it was currently displaying zero power. A flash of memory entered him, a vast body of water, with patches of green and caretaker beasts spawning out of massive, person-sized eggs.

"Unregistered Mana Source Connected to Hull" Rain read out loud. He knew somehow that the dashed lines meant the power source was detectable but presently disconnected from the main grid...

"What does that mean?" Malz asked, breaking Rain’s reverie.

Like a flash of lightning, the dots finally connected in Rain’s head, forming a dread constellation of truth, one that his godflesh body reacted to by pushing anger into his heart and mind.

"Rain? Are you alright?"

"It’s... the godflesh..." Rain panted, taking short breaths as he tried to push his mind against his body. "It’s making me... angry..."

After long, long moments, Rain finally calmed, but the kernel of alien rage was there.

"I think... I think I know how that demon is surviving down below. And where."