The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 305: Volume 5 - Epilogue

Chapter 305: Volume 5 - Epilogue

Malzkael Espan Memoria felt forgotten.

She waited a month for Rain and Cassie to get back to her, all for nothing. What good was instant communication when they were just going to disappear on her? They hadn’t even bothered to text except right before a portal down was opened.

Rain had an excuse; he was less tech-savvy than most people from Ayther, though he’d shown a lot of improvement just before he was sent on the titan-hunting expedition. But he wanted to help her find lost members of House Memoria, and surely they had to be kicking around somewhere.

In calmer moments she imagined he might have died, even though he was physically tougher than Cassiel and her combined, physicality meant little on a continent as mana-rich as Diurnus.

In her less charitable moments, she imagined Cassie holding him in a state of perpetual distraction, perhaps kicking things up in Farway, which was the only city permitted on the continent and thus one of the few places angels and the rest of the Myriad interacted with some frequency. Mostly so that angels could run the trade in monster and spirit parts that they had advantages in retrieving, seeing as they thrived better on the mana-rich continent and could fly.

It didn’t help that her work environment had gone from "okay" to absolutely hostile at the drop of a hat. All because she’d made one offhand comment about how Son of Heaven Victoriam should learn his history. She felt like the only angel the only angel not excited about his damn super-weapon, since in her book it would only serve to make Heaven’s rule more distant. Not that Heaven should have to rule anyone - another of her unpopular opinions.

So Malz did what she felt she did best: she found a way to retreat.

Her new paycheck let her buy books at rates that quickly filled her apartment in the Black Tower, but it was the weekend when her teammates tried to convince her to tone down her rhetoric that even the sanctuary of reading didn’t feel like enough.

"We’re just saying that you should be more careful, my angel, otherwise we’ll never get to go to the surface or fight demons," Ed advised. Of her two subordinates, he’d "cleaned up" the most, even going so far as to stop wearing the dark makeup he’d gotten Lute into.

"I don’t care about fighting demons. I want to find my family."

"We know, but-"

Malz stormed out of her own room, leaving Ed and Lute staring out at her with concern.

She went to the Galleria, hoping a new book would calm her feelings, but shopping for one lost its allure the moment she happened on a copy of Rising Son - An Autobiography Of Vinam Victoriam. Seeing his smug face on the front of a book reminded her of just how many people were screwing over themselves and her on his behalf.

Leaving the store, she hovered between shops before happening upon a sale for climbing equipment, and that was when she had an idea on how to really get away.

Skipping the sale, she bought a couple of mana crystals, a lightcaster halo, and a body-hugging skinsuit that would let her still use her wings.

That night, without telling anyone, Malz made her descent to the mycelium layer.

Her first destination was the bridge where the cameraman almost died.

It was almost eerie, seeing how clean the structure was.

She sighed, wishing Rain and Cassiel were here to stop her from getting in her own head, but they weren’t so solving the mystery of the mystery demonwas the best plan she had for what to do with herself.

Flying around the trunk of the tree, she quickly spotted several ways to enter much further down. Why was she focused on getting into the tree? Because she recalled that in the secret room Rain had showed her, there was indications of an unregistered mana source somewhere below, and only the Araqlun world tree had indicators of a direct route. Knowing that the dead world tree Araqlun was built on had been indicated to be attached to something else had her wondering what was really down there.

Just to be safe though, she popped into magiform and sent an eye searching the darkness ahead. With her magiform eyes, it was easy for her to see in the dark, and she saw a long, broken metal shaft resting against the inner wall of the hollowed-out tree.

Must’ve been an elevator...

Malz returned to normal, wanting to conserve her magiform for if she really needed it. Using it burned through mana, even as it enabled a higher regeneration rate when there was ambient mana to use instead, and there wasn’t a lot of that down here. From what she’d researched about magiform, it gave her more manifest "authority" over the world around her, just as war form would give someone more authority over their own body. But somehow less mana meant less world, at least in her interpretation of On The Forms of Demons by Glowwell Memoria.

Angels rarely admitted to any sort of similarity to their dark counterparts, which had made Glowwell as unpopular as Malz felt she was getting.

Focus, Malz... just because you don’t see the demon here doesn’t mean she isn’t hiding out down there...

For that matter, did the demoness even know she was in Heaven? She said she was a place called Norneau, which Rain had come from, though his family were actually nobles from Montmorency. From what Malz had researched, Norneau was a small-ish city focused on magic education. One of the squads had complained about being assigned there long-term to look for demons after they fought off a siege... and of course, it was where the abomination known as a metatron had died, though only three people in Heaven knew that boy had been Rain’s lover.

The further down Malz went, the creepier things got.

Not creepy in the way of the mycelium, which was alive but alien, and yet a place that angels would rather exploit through races that could survive mana deprivation better. Rather, creepy in that there was nothing alive. Or creeping.

The illumination of her lightcaster only made the shadows of the broken elevator play out in fragmentary illusions of motion and eventually desensitized her to their shifts, allowing the worry over what exactly the shaft was leading to was.

It was only when she reached the bottom that signs of life reasserted themself in the dust.

Footprints... clawprints?

There had been a lot of activity in the area, and yet there was no sign of what had happened or when.

Just that someone had been very busy around the place where the broken shaft met the metal floor...

Metal!

It was a structure. She was standing on top of a structure that stretched into the darkness so far she couldn’t make out a horizon, much less a curve. She had no idea what the metal was, but even if it was something as mundane as steel, it had to be strong to hold up the weight of all the world trees above it... and plentiful enough to make whoever retrieved it rich in Heaven...

SNAP! Thwwrrr-

A sudden sound broke her reverie.

She looked around, expecting an ambush, but it wasn’t from around her that the sound was coming... it was from above.

She had a moment to gaze at a large mesh of steel wire closing on the airspace above, completely covering the hole she’d just come through.

It was a trap, and not the sort of trap even a demoness could pull off alone...

The sudden sound of a magical gun going off made Malz flinch and duck as she pulled up her shields while simultaneously drawing her staff out of storage.

She had a vague sense of the shot going wide and high, but was more worried about the four-armed demoness approaching her with the gun, confidence in the way she pointed it right at Malz’s head.

"Don’t move! Drop your weapons!"

"Do you want me to not move or to drop my weapons?" Malz asked.

The demoness scowled. "Drop your weapons first. Then don’t move!"

Malz was strange for an angel. She liked wicked things. Dark colors. Forbidden books - or at least banned ones... and knives. She’d been so looking forward to showing off her knife collection to Rain and Cassie on Ayther, where no one would look at her sideways for it, but here the entire thing served to buy her time as she let one knife fall after another...

"I’m not here to fight... I’m just looking around..." Malz said as she dropped her seventh knife into the small pile.

"Fuck, how many of those things do you have?" she crossed her lower arms while keeping the gun trained on Malz.

"I don’t actually know..." As she dropped another knife, Malz checked her senses, confirming that there was ambient mana she could use. "Are you here alone?"

"No, I’m here with your mother. Keep disarming."

Malz let out a small laugh, her wings twitching a little as she held back the rest. The girl’s rudeness was refreshing. "I’d kill to see her again."

"Try anything funny and you will." The demoness was quick on the uptake.

She looks younger than in the video, Malz thought to herself. "So, um... How did you get here?"

The demoness didn’t answer.

Malz decided on testing the waters a bit, "You sound like you’re from Ayther... Maybe Areth?" She was over twenty knives and one staff out now. "Is that a Norneau accent-"

Another shot sounded as the demoness shot a bolt of magic into the pile of knives, and as some skittered away, Malz was glad she’d put them out past arm’s reach. "Don’t try to be pals with me. You’re my prisoner."

"Prisoner implies a prison." Malz gestured around. "I don’t see one here."

A hearty, set of claps from behind made Malz and her would-be captor jump.

"Now, now... that I can provide," a tall, male demon with fiery red hair stepped out of a portal. He wasn’t in a form of power, but portal magic was supposed to be exclusive to angels, and Malz knew it took a lot of power to connect two places. "Good work Anko. You may return to the city... and consider your mistake forgiven. Others will take over for-"

Drawing on all her power, Malzkael pushed herself into magiform. With her magiform eyes she could now see the alarm spell that had been attached to the net. The distant thickening of mana, likely from the unknown source she was also here to investigate... and the sudden surge of mana that dwarfed her own as the demon took control of the ambient mana away from her... and then more.

"I see... you are almost a seraphim. That will be useful." The suddenly massive demon grabbed her by the throat and suddenly all the mana in Malz’s body felt like it was turning against her.

She cried out, she flailed and tried to burst her mana, to get away, but his grip would not relent, even when she put enough force into a burst that sent Anko tumbling away.

"I am an Executioner. They’ll come for me..." Malz fell out of magiform, and that was when she saw the demon for what he was.

He loomed more than five measures tall in his war form, and at his back were wings of pure night, more than a match for her own as they stretched darker than the black behind them.

Magiform and war form united... This was not some random demon, lost on the tides of Perdition...

"A Duke... how...?" she gasped.

The demon pulled her closer.

"A Duke for now." The demon smiled. "Soon the day will come when all will know me by other epitaphs. Generations will tell the story of the Maledict, who burned Heaven from the skies. Maledict of the Heavenfall... Demon Lord Maledict... and you are going to help me."

"Never..."

The smile faded from Maledict’s face, and Malz felt her dread rise. She knew the look on his face, that cold slide back into logic. She had used it herself, after all, and she saw it in the unspoken rules by which Rain had smiled...

"Oh, little angel..." Maledict slowly wrapped the fingers of his left hand around Malz’s right wing... And he pulled, and he pulled... And Malz screamed and screamed... and when he was done, he dropped the wing in front of Anko, who had looked away in horror.

"You don’t have a choice."

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