The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 388: Rain In The Dark

Chapter 388: Rain In The Dark

In his cell, Rain lay in utter blackness on the floor, one hand cradling the wrist where they’d severed the other.

He’d managed to strike a blow against the unprepared angel, but his only reward was to be restrained and maimed, before being injected with something that made the regrowth of his missing hand long and painful.

He’d screamed when it started.

Screamed and screamed despite there being no one but the darkness to receive them. And when he was silent, there was nothing to make sound outside of his cell.

Darkness and silence turned time in on itself. Minutes could have been days or hours or years. Did he imagine the building rumbling and shuddering? Or the whisps of sensation from a hand he didn’t have.

And then he heard a gentle voice.

"Hey."

Rain looked up to find Kir leaning against a wall. Somehow visible despite the darkness.

"Kir I... you’re alive?"

"Not so much," he quirked a smile in the dark. "But I guess that just means things aren’t working out for either of us, huh?" But when Kir leaned down, Rain saw only horror.

Where the rest of his face should have been, his skull was visible, grey flesh overgrowing a missing eye. The horns on the right side of his face were missing and instead of wings he had mangled growths of loose, grey skin on bones.

Rain felt no fear at seeing this, only a deep swirling surge of regret that rose through bile and breath and pain into a gasping, sobbing cry.

"You got so comfortable... letting them use you," Kir said.

"I didn’t mean for any of this to happen..." Rain knew it was impossible for Kir to be here. That who he was talking to had to be some sort of apparition or hallucination.

"You thought you were fighting them, didn’t you? Saving yourself for the long game... never realizing they’d never let you out of their grasp. Not when you showed so much potential..." Kir’s voice grew sharper.

"I just wanted to make things right... to-"

"You wanted it all!" Kir interrupted. "And now you have nothing!" He chuckled, giggled - almost - with the sound of madness tingeing it. "In that, I suppose we are the same. That’s what they meant you to be... their little key..." Kir crouched in front of Rain, his head and neck twisting and crunching as he held Rain’s gaze. "But you can end it all... for both of us..."

Rain shuddered. The apparition no longer sounded like the Kir he knew, but maybe it was only right... He’d left Kir behind, carrying only his guilt with him... There was nothing of his old life he could claim without ruining it. Not his old life. Not his new one.

Alone with his demons, Rain sobbed and cried and promised.

He would end everything just to finally have peace.

And then something real happened.

The door hissed open.

For a long moment, Rain stared at the portal, half expecting some new angel come to torture him. But there was no one. Instead of the harsh white lights against a black interior, everything glowed a sickly green.

Cautiously he stood, pushing forward into the darkness. Looking left, he saw the dead-end where the tower ended. And to the right he saw more cells open.

Some had prisoners.

Angels and Elevated in worse states than his. Most cowered in the corners of the cells. Some simply held themselves and stared, unwilling to move.

His heart wanted to help them, but Kir’s voice reminded him of the price of helping Heaven.

So Rain stumbled on. Until he spotted the control room for the prison. The circular one-way glass that allowed the wardens to spy along any of the halls without being seen. As he came between the elevator and the door, he saw inside the room. Two angels were dead, their uniforms slashed to ribbons as if by claws.

A clatter sounded from elsewhere and suddenly Kir’s voice urged him into the warden room. From inside, he saw as a squad of five demons stalked out of one of the halls, their weapons and claws covered in blood as they laughed and joked.

When Kir spoke, Rain jumped. "What you need is in here," the apparition said, hand on a small, unassuming cube with rounded corners.

As soon as Rain pried it open, he saw them.

The injectors.

One the same black color inside as was used to rob him of his Godflesh-given powers, and three other varieties besides. The injectors possessed of pure white sang to him, but Kir stayed his hand.

"Do not touch the white ones, or it will allow them to puppet you again..." Instead he gestured at a set of injectors filled with grey-blue substance. "Take as many of these as you can. It will not give you back everything, but they won’t be able to control you... and together we can end it."

For a moment Rain contemplated the madness he was feeling, listening to the ghost of his dead love. There was no way the real Kir could have known any of this. No way he should have either... but if the ghost was wrong and he wound up killing himself or dying to demons, then listening or not wouldn’t matter.

So Rain listened.

The first injection hurt. A dull pain with needle-like depth.

The second burned, dullness replaced with lancing heat.

The third made his whole body clench and spasm, and in his shelter he knocked over a chair and one of the dead angels.But behind the pain he felt it. Power.

The fourth injector was the last, and he barely got it into himself by the time he heard the demons start to hurry over.

The first, a wiry little fiend of a variety Rain didn’t recognize, stopped in the door, exclaiming, "What the Heaven is that?"

Those were the last words he said before Rain barrelled into him, smashing down with both fists and caving in the demon’s head even though his body was reinforced with magic.

The other demons bellowed and attacked, but within moments the next thing Rain knew was that he was standing amidst their mangled, broken bodies.

Though naked, he felt that he was dressed in their blood, and where once his godflesh skin had shone white, it was now deep, blood-marbled black. But the gold remained. It wound through his flesh - no longer in fine-laced patterns bute more like cracks and broken lightning made metal.

"Shattered ceramic, made beautiful in its mending..." Kir’s ghost caressed Rain’s ears. "We must go."

Rain tugged the loincloth off of one of his fallen assailants and dressed himself with it, before taking a short sword off the first demon he’d killed. Only then did he approach the elevator, to find the door open and no lift waiting. He’d barely started to wonder where to go when Kir bade him descend.

Rain tried reaching inside because he felt he needed to deploy his wings. He could feel the memory in his body, but the wings refused to form. There were no ropes, but off to one side Rain saw there was a ladder made of horizontal recesses in the stone, each about a half-measure apart.

He started to climb, careful of the sword as he held it in his teeth, tasting the blood on it.

The deeper he went, the more it felt as if he was approaching something vast and powerful. A pressure made of many kinds of mana - more concentrated than what it was like in a dungeon or the land of Diurnus.

The entire climb, Kir urged him deeper, whispering love, the promise to end, and reminders of pain...

"They tortured us with expectations, you and I. But we’ll be free soon. We’ll give them what they deserve. And then we can die..."

The longer Rain climbed, however, the more he felt a mounting sense of panic inside. Until at last he paused, letting the surge or reinforcing magic in his body wane from his battle with the demons. Though he reached for it, the sword slipped out of his mouth, cutting his leg and falling as he caught his breath against a rising swell of panic. The wound seeped, not that he could see the color of his blood in the green emergency lighting, but he felt somehow that it was truly his blood and not the golden ichor that allowed godflesh to regrow itself.

After only a second, the sword clattered against the bottom of the shaft. After taking time to just breathe as Kir’s voice continued to hurry him, Rain let himself drop, landing easily next to the blade he’d been carrying.

"We’re here," Kir giggled. "Hurry. Hurry!"

Slamming the sword between the grooves of the elevator door, Rain pried them open until he could get his fingers in and force the doors apart.

A short hallway greeted him, split into three corridors.

Ahead, he could feel the source of the mana that had caused his body the most stress.

To the left, he felt nothing, and to the right, he felt... something else. Mana. Massed but mottled, tinged with suffering and regret...

"We can free them when we’re done," Kir appeared again, in the hall ahead. "Come, Rain. Come to me..."

Though a part of him felt more drawn to the other hall, he stepped forward. Obeying as he readied the sword in his hand.

And inside, amidst towering arrays containing and channeling mana taken from the most powerful beings to have lived amidst the Triune Worlds, Rain saw angels and demons alike filling the air with blood and death as they fought for control.

He strode amongst them, heedless of their battles as he approached where Kir beckoned.

Reached out, a surge of uncontrolled magic shattering something that lay between him and what he needed to end it all.

He touched... and then the laughter of the dead filled his ears.

The madness entered him. The pain, wrath, and regret of a man whose torment had been made the lynchpin of Heaven’s foundations.

The head of Helios dissolved into Rain’s godflesh as Kir laughed in manic relief.

But when he could hear Kir no longer, Rain found that it was he who was laughing.

Because he knew.

He knew how to end it all.