The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 298: Death At A Funeral

Chapter 298: Death At A Funeral

The skies beyond the world tree were red as Kir watched from his perch about a kilometer away from the graveyard.

Unlike Norneau where cremation was the norm, here the dead were buried at the roots of the world tree. A fitting tribute to the massive entity that sustained the Kingdom in more ways than service as a nigh-unassailable capital.

A cursory investigation of the trunk had proven that it was entirely resistant to Kir trying to carve a hole into it with magic, and not just because the shell of the tree seemed to be half-composed of naturally occurring, magically reinforced carbon fiber. Trying to delve the tree’s structure had given him the feeling of being watched, and so he stopped as soon as he felt it, not wanting to risk that there might be a great spirit he could offend by existing, as with the spirit of the lake.

The last thing he needed was to get swatted from behind by a tree that could have served as an orbital elevator on Earth’s moon.

I wonder what happened to Earth...

"Eye on the prize, here they come," Kiryu said.

After identifying the correct graveyard, Kir had gone through quite a lot of trouble to make sure he’d have every advantage for the fight he was about to start, and all he had to do was wait.

One by one the carriages arrived at the small temple of Shin Seker, a local death god. Nothing particularly godly happened as the hours ticked by. Kir was beginning to wonder if they were about to have a night-time burial when at last the procession left the building, slaves bearing the closed casket of the woman he’d killed and thrown from the kilometers-high bridge.

They lay the coffin before a mausoleum and opened the lid, and Kir could barely make out the upper body inside of it.

"Didn’t think they’d have more than a smear to bury," Kiryu cut a joke about the dead slaver.

"I imagine some creative reconstruction must have occurred."

"If corporate "peacekeeping" taught me anything, it was that closed-casket funerals are a powerful message. Use a bigger caliber next time."

Kir ignored him. What happened next would depend entirely on whether or not the slavers had the decency to leave their kids out of the funeral proceedings. It took a little magical magnification for him to verify that there were, unfortunately, minors in the crowd.

He noted through manasight the magical sheen around most of the family heads, their house mages, and the sprinkling of mercenaries who wandered amidst the graves. Most were indications of powerful shielding, the nature and power of which would be proven in the next few moments...

Alright... time to make an entrance.

"Sure you don’t want to go for an explosive start?"

"I’m not blowing up kids."

In Norneau, Kir had the luxury of familiarity with the terrain and the city’s relative newness. It had not become viable over the course of its history as a market for slavery until the destruction of the siege, and those rich enough to own slaves had been somewhat balanced out by the sheer presence of mages from the Academy, which had in its own way provided viable alternatives to such labor.

Thus, it was easy for sentiments to turn against the practice of slavery since the Syndicate’s presence in Norneau had been largely parasitic - taking advantage of students with debts and the less fortunate.

Here, however, slavery was clearly entrenched - as the daytime activity in the city showed him. There was a magic school, but it was a high school compared to the Academy - which was a shame considering the size of the city’s libraries. Slaves performed the most mind-numbing tasks of cleaning, farming, and clearing away the snow and ashfalls that resulted from avalanches that cascaded down from the canopy, to say nothing of the plantations that operated away from Amrita’s roots.

Imogen actually supported Kir’s planned strike, which he’d told her about as he was busy mixing up the surprise that was waiting for the funeral attendees. Although "mixing" might have been a strong term, since he had essentially rearranged lamp oil into hexogen before plasticizing it through brute-force magical composition. The result was 500 kilograms of malleable, grey, and completely non-magical high explosives, which he intended to decapitate the Syndicate leadership all at once.

"What a wonderful term, ’decapitation strike’," she’d commented after Kir explained his plan. "It will certainly work better for you now that travel is more difficult. And these ’ mangas’ of yours... genius. The less educated will find the crystallization of the Ghostheart’s story much more palatable in this form than some complicated treatise... though I will of course be producing the latter for the more erudite circles. I must say it feels exciting to participate in a cause instead of merely supporting one. You are a devilishly clever young man, Mr. Gale."

In the present, Kir put the devil into his cleverness by assuming his war form before standing at the edge of the world tree’s bark and falling forward. He deployed his wings a moment later, picking up speed before leveling off at around 120 kilometers per hour.

When he was less than a minute away, Kir flared the magic in his heart to full brightness, becoming a rapidly approaching blue star.

That should give them time to get the kids out... He kept his eyes on the crowd, noting when one man - Tohn Goldman - started hastily pushing his wife and two children away from the crowd. Moments later, Kir had the full attention of everyone when he landed atop the Nebima family mausoleum.

The natural result as that every guard converged on his location. But what he hadn’t expected was not being attacked off the bat.

"Glad to see it’s still a phenomenon amongst the privileged to assume they’re safe, especially when they aren’t," Kiryu noted.

Kir was quick to withdraw his wings, but he hadn’t thought he’d have the chance to actually say anything. The way he was gawked at almost made him roll his eyes.

Unwittingly taking a page out of Rainier’s book, he smiled, baring his warform fangs underneath his intensely purple eyes. He might as well start with the basics...

"Hello," he rumbled out, dropping his voice an octave as he drew Kangetsu in rifle form and rested the weapon on his shoulder. "I see my handiwork has not gone unnoticed. Send the children away and I promise you all a quick death."

That seemed to snap most of them out of their stupor. And the one who spoke first was Reginald Goldman.

"Ghostheart! You dare show your face here?!" The century-mage challenged, right before a cacophony of voices started to shout.

"What the hell is this?" "What’s going on?" "Guards!"

At the last, the dozens of guards gathered cut loose with every form of ranged weapon and spell.

Confusion reigned, and Kir’s shields were strong enough that he could boost his speed and draw their shots amongst the tombstones. The slaves were the most prudent amongst them, running away from the battle as soon as it began, but Kir noted that rather than send their children to safety, most of the slavers were tucking into a more compact crowd as the mages amongst them took to the front, adding their firepower to the mix.

Between exploding tombstones, Kir fired Kangetsu. The first two guards to fall did so as Kir painted a beam of pure energy through them.

A quick burst from the flamethrower round burned a maven who had generated a cloud of red poison around themself.

A quick switch to sword form let Kir topple a particularly tall tombstone onto yet another guard, and then a cryo-round toppled the coffin of Desrig Nebima into the pair of guards that had taken cover behind it.

The one type of firepower Kir did not use was lightning, and he had a very good reason for that.

"They’re getting away," Kiryu suddenly warned him, and sure enough, Kir saw a small group of guards and the bulk of the family heads starting to break off from the battle. Reginald Goldman led the way, and Kir put a passing shot into his shields before the man dove forward on his belly, the cover of a tombstone allowing him to quickly get up and start sprinting as he left the children of the other families behind to dive into the heavily fortified carriage that already held his family. "Just blow the damn thing!"

Kir put Kangetsu away and put more mana into his anti-kinetic shields.

His maneuvers had served two purposes. One was to draw fire away from directions that included children, and another was to encourage his attackers to use the mausoleums for their own cover. He’d carefully avoided even firing at the tombs because as part of his early-morning preparations, he’d broken in and carefully packed Desrig Nebima’s intended resting place with 180 kilos of plastic explosive, developed from four barrels of refined lamp oil, nitrogen extracted directly from the atmosphere, and natural plastination agents extracted from the world tree itself.

The moment he clapped his hands together, the burst of radio waves he generated activated the primitive crystal radio receiver he’d attached to the massive block of high explosive bridged the connection to the primitive sodium-ion battery he’d cobbled together inside of a tin cup.

Fifty-three guards suddenly found themselves shredded by stone, scrap iron shards, and bits of dead slavers as the explosion left behind a crater the size of a basketball court, toppling tombstones, monuments, and everyone within a hundred meters of the blast.

Even Kir wound up on his belly, his legs swept out from under him as the ground rippled.

Unlike the half dozen guards who remained able to fight, Kir had taken measures to protect his hearing. They fell in rapid succession as Kir took advantage of their dazed state to execute them with Kangetsu-Dar’s bayonet.

As the last guard fell, he turned and took aim at the fleeing slavers. The ones unlucky enough not to have nearby carriages or the ability to escape using magic.

He hesitated, seeing that many of them still had children with them.

"What are you waiting for? You won’t get another chance like this!" Kiryu shouted in his head.

Realizing his other half was right, Kir took one long moment to harden his heart as he revolved Kangetsu-Dar through the options to the most precise one he had as he began to march towards the exit of the cemetery.

Amplifying the magic in the gun, Kir burst the shield of one woman before the beam of blue energy took her at the back of the head and she collapsed, her hands dragging down the two children she’d been running with.

A second shot and a fat elf who was being shoved along by two guards fell, sliding into sizzling halves along with the men who flanked him.

A third, and the heir to the Nebima family pitched forward with a a missing leg, bleeding out as he was abandoned by his surviving retinue.

A fourth, and the scion of the Tihvan family, collapsed atop the tombstone of a commoner, holding her chest as shock began to set in.

The nearest squad of soldiers arrived then, swords and shields at the ready, and Kangetsu grew out a bayonet as Kir engaged them, leveraging both his war form’s weight and superior strength to batter and stab them.

Before the second squad could close, he put a beam of light into a fleeing noblewoman and her escort. This squad was accompanied by a Captain, who quickly drew everyone into a shielding formation as they tried to block Kir from following the fleeing slavers and nobles. One shot with Kangetsu-Dar’s beam proved that they had drawn together a formidable shield.

Seeing this, the elven captain let himself have a relieved smile before calling out. "You’ve done enough damage, demon. Cast down your arms and surrender, or face the wrath of the Kingdom!" His words were backed by even more soldiers, who rode in on megatheria - giant, bear-like climbers with four shovel-like front teeth and large molars. Entire squads dismounted quickly and became to take up formations to surround him.

In mocking response, Kir unfurled his wings.

"Warn your King to dispense with all slavers, before I do it for Amrita."

He turned his back on the soldiers, and came face to face with the scion of house Tihvan, who was clutching at her chest where a beam of magic had gone through her left shoulder.

"Please..." she choked. "Mercy..." her eyes were full of tears, her hair in shambles and her face covered in streaks of makeup. From what Kir could see, the hole in her shoulder was not a fatal wound, given the beam had cauterized its way through.

"Don’t be a hypocrite, just because she’s a girl," Kiryu warned.

The elven youth had the crystal-orange hair of a stone elf, and similarly colored eyes. She was about his age, and thanks to his executing her father - the fat elf from earlier - she was now likely the next in line, from what he recalled.

Kir held Kangetsu-Dar out with a single hand, withdrawing the bayonette and resting the barrel on her forehead, which began to sizzle a little from the heat at the end of the rifle.

"Mercy," she begged.

"Justice," Kir replied.

Behind him, the captain shouted for every mage and maven to open fire, but Kir was already in the air, and the shots flew all over the place and burst against his shields as he led them up and away from the cowering woman he’d let live.

He left the scene of slaughter behind him, feeling guilty only in that he had no way to guarantee a full decapitation of the Syndicate in Amrita... unless he’d been willing to slaughter children.

Two heads had survived, and perhaps one direct heir, though no Syndicate family had escaped untouched... and now his threat was known.

"You’re too soft. You could have vaporized them all with one strike and gone back by now. Even if they get out of the family business, those kids will come back for revenge one day, I guarantee it." Kiryu said.

"I’ll deal with them only when I have to."

"Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Next time do it clean. End the bloodlines."