The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 325: A Light In The Dark

Chapter 325: A Light In The Dark

Malzkael’s body hurt... she’d gotten so used to this that she was able to treat it as merely a fact to the silence of her uncounted days in captivity.

Today, she woke up to find Anko waiting across from her. Sitting cross-legged with another box of... things.

Not junk, because Malz found some of the items fascinating. Artifacts of something... potentially outside magic. Like the ones in the museum at the corner of Araglun’s manufacturing district.

Had she not seen those examples, she would not have known the one historical fact that had bought her a few extra fashions.

In ancient days before the practice of magic, angels tamed lightning and called it electricity.

Malz had held back the degree of her knowledge, parsing out hints in conversations with Anko. Partly she’d wanted to make sure she wasn’t talking with someone who would rather be torturing her. And partly, she wanted Anko to pity her. To grow comfortable with her. To need her to do what she couldn’t, while assuming Malz was helpless.

She hated how her helplessness was not feigned.

Today, however, Anko had fallen asleep where she sat. Malz could see bruises about her shoulders, indications of training, most likely. She’d laid several items out in a line, but the one Malz wanted was right in front of her. The tablet.

"Anko?" Malz tried quietly.

The demon didn’t stir.

Shifting forward, Malz reached, resisting the urge to wince with every clink and rattle of her chains.

She needed to get it before her mana was drained. But as she finally touched it, her fingers proved stiff and unresponsive as she tried to get under its thin profile.

Malz suppressed a desperate whine. She finally got a fingernail underneath and tilted it onto its side, wincing at the scraping sound it made on the metal floor-

"Snrk- Hm? You’re awake?"

Malz’s heart battered her ribcage. She’d barely gotten back onto her bed in time to hide the tablet under her ragged sheet.

"I-I just got up... how are you, Anko?"

Anko flinched, one of her lower arms rising up to hold the opposite, upper shoulder on the bruise. She blinked a few times before looking at the things she’d laid in front of her. "Something’s missing," the demon said.

Malz’s heartbeat increased. She was too weak to fight. A cold sweat began down her spine.

Anko’s eyebrows knitted together, then she reached for the box and pulled out the draining sphere, and another tablet, this one with worse cracks in the screen than the one Malz had just stolen. "Thought I had two of these..." she muttered, placing it where the stolen one had been.

"You look hurt," Malz said, hoping to distract her. They’d had about a dozen or so visits by now, so Malz knew well that Anko was very touchy about being the subject of scrutiny.

"That’s none of your business."

"Sorry..."

The demoness let out a huff. "Don’t know why you’d even ask... not like we’re friends..." She reached into the box again and pulled out Malz’s meal for the day. Another bowl of gruel but with a bit of unidentified meat, putting it in Malz’s hands. "Eat."

Malz held the bowl for a moment longer. "I asked because... you’re the nicest demon I’ve met so far."

"I’m not nice," Anko insisted as Malz obediently started to eat.

Malz was so hungry, she simply tilted the bowl back and let the contents, which were mostly liquid, slide into her throat. The bit of meat she saved for last, and the little burst of flavor reminded her that somewhere out there in the world was good food. The first thing she wanted to do if she escaped was eat anything and everything as long as it had flavor.

Once she was done, Malz licked her fingers clean, only to find Anko holding up one of the tiny, tablet-like devices.

"You said before you might know how to make these work. Show me."

"I don’t know if I have the mana... I’d need more than what I have to convert it into what I think these things need..."

"How much more?"

"To try? I don’t know. I can’t do anything if you keep draining my mana every time you come down here."

Anko was already out of sequence with how things usually went. Malz didn’t want to push too hard in case it only made her retreat into protocol...

With a reluctant frown, Anko put the draining orb back in the box. "Fine. Show me."

Looking down, Malz chewed her lips. The tiny tablet was about the size of her palm. When she turned it about she found little holes on the bottom. And a couple of buttons on each side well-gummed by dust.

Nothing happened when she pushed the buttons, so she held it carefully and tried passing a small conversion of mana into electricity into the device.

"You’re doing something. I can feel it," Anko said.

"I’m trying." She really was. And to her surprise, after a long minute something happened.

A symbol appeared, a rectangle with a red bar at the bottom and a lightning bolt in the middle.

As soon as it happened, Anko snatched the small tablet out of her hand and jumped for joy. "Yes! Finally, I can get out of here!" She smiled for the first time since they’d met, and Malz clutched her chest, wondering if she hadn’t just consigned herself to something even worst than- "What the..."

Anko held the tablet with two hands. The light had gone out. A look of anger and betrayal crossed her face as she looked at Malz.

"It worked! I know it!" Malz said quickly. "It just needed more than what you let me give it."

"How much more?"

"I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!" Malz spoke quickly. "I’m starving. I barely had the mana to do that, and I doubt anyone would understand if I tried to teach it."

She was lying more than a little at this point. It took very little mana to make small amounts of electricity or magnetism, as long as there were elements nearby that were conducive to such things. It had been a fashionable prank when she was younger to lay one’s hands on another while channeling a bit of electricity into them to make their hair stand up... until someone accidentally stopped another angel’s heart.

"Could you do it again if you had more mana?" Anko asked, leaning in.

"I think..." Malz steeled herself. This was her shot. "Yes. I think I can."

Anko started gathering the things on the floor. She tossed them into the box indelicately and stood. "Tomorrow when I come back, I’ll have more food. Don’t say anything to the guard."

She walked over and pounded on the door, and was let out by a sulky-looking vampire, his tri-jawed face sunken with starvation.

The moment Anko left, Malz lay down on her bed.

She couldn’t believe it. She’d done it. She’d stolen something that would help her...

As her heart began to settle, she felt tears rise in her eyes for the first time in a long time. Tears of hope.

Slipping the tablet out from under her filthy sheet, she searched it for the same sort of slot that the smaller version had, and planted her thumb on it.

Please work... Please... she prayed silently.

On and on she prayed, waiting for much, much longer than with the hand-sized device.

Would it work? The surface was cracked, but mostly intact.

Please...

She needed it to work. She needed it to be just like a tablet from above. If she could just get a message out, warn Heaven that Maledict was coming-

Instead of a symbol, the entire screen flickered and then lit up, turning white as a circular set of squares appeared. They rotated about as she fed it more charge, hypnotized by the implicit call to wait as she powered the ancient thing.

Her light in the dark.

Her way out...

After an eternity, the screen changed.

Ancient letters appeared, and Malz recognized the script of Old Angelic, but in a form that was without any of the flourishes she expected of the calligraphy. It was easier to read, but harder to understand compared to what she knew.

But at the center of the screen, a box appeared, with all capital letters that she began to slowly interpret.

"In... Increase leg... no, Increase light? Increase lighting for fakial unlock..." she whispered to herself. "Fakial... what’s a fakial?" She looked at the tablet, careful to keep her finger on the hole that was receiving energy from her. Ancient angelic had multiple uses for the letter ’c’ which was present in the word she couldn’t understand. Next to it, the word used a hard ’c’ as a reinforcer for the ’k’, but that was an artifact that had been discarded millennia ago by the Middle-Angelic form...

Think, Malz, think! You didn’t sit through a year of Boreal’s lectures for nothing...

Eventually, she realized she was too malnourished to overcome her ignorance of that word. But she thought she knew what the device was asking for. It needed more light.

As quietly as she could, Malz held the tablet against herself with one hand keeping up the charge as she approached the door, dragging her ragged blanket behind her.

She placed it along the bottom crack, careful not to make a sound despite the chains that insisted on rattling. She found herself unable to completely reach the farthest corner, until she had the idea to use her foot instead. And only once that was in place did she return to her bed, giddy with hope.

After a relieved gasp that the device still worked, she positioned it laying down as she kept one hand on it to charge and lifted another to produce a weak, sickly light.

Please... Please... she prayed.

The screen changed. It flickered and a new box appeared, slowly resolving an image of Malz’s face while a new set of boxes rotated in a circle.

Fakial... Facial! Of course! It wanted to see her face. Maybe as a safeguard against demons? If the device was a personal one, then Malz knew she would still be screwed if it wanted a specific face... but if not-

New letters appeared.

I.D. CONFIRMED, DR. EYKO NASUMI

WELCOME

CHECKING FOR NETWORK...

The first two lines disappeared so quickly, Malz couldn’t catch the meaning of them. But the last message lingered... and lingered...

It took almost five minutes for Malz to realize what it was looking for. A network. It must be able to link to Akash! If she could just-

NETWORK NOT FOUND.

LOCAL DATA ONLY.

As soon as she understood these words, Malz’s heart dropped like a stone.

Different tears welled in her eyes.