The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 414: Sigil Core

Chapter 414: Sigil Core

The world went away, but instead of floating in darkness, Malz found herself standing in an endless expanse of light grey.

What is this? she asked, only to find her words came out more as thoughts.

As if in response, the same unknown runes that ran along Kiryu and Ferro’s suits appeared on a panel of blue light, which spelled out a single word.

On the right, a new screen appeared, one that showed what she assumed to be a complete set of the runes along with their corresponding runes in Common. Below the letters were numbers, all written in Angelic numerals with no Common counterparts. The two numeric scripts were near enough in shape to be recognized anyway.

But it’s not Angelic... these are Arabic numerals... the knowledge from the necklace rose, allowing her to correct her thinking. At least the punctuation was also standard.

On the left of the central screen, yet another screen appeared, its runes greyed out.

Why not just use Common? She reached out, and a message appeared above the runic key, this time in Common.

Sigil script is meant for magic alone.

The message and it disappeared at her touch. The key remained, and so she began to look back and forth between it and the central screen.

Soon she had her answer as to what she was looking at. The central screen read:

BEGIN

Malz touched it, and the central screen was replaced by a line that split in two. At the same time, the grey screen to the left turned blue, and she saw a series of boxed-in runes highlight themselves.

A note appeared on the left screen, in a larger box beneath the runes, written in the runic script.

It took her a few moments to translate, but the runes above the note read:

AND OR XOR NAND NOR XNOR NOT¹

And at the far end of the shortlist were the greyed-out words: IF, THEN, and AS.

Taking a second look at the central screen, she found that the bottommost word on the tree was still BEGIN. There were two input paths that led to the words ON and OFF.

As soon as she touched the box, a new note appeared on her left. Instructions, she realized, for how to proceed.

Though it took her a while to figure out the interface, soon she was inputting commands. It was a surprise when a tiny chime sounded and the lines lit up blue. A screen appeared for just a moment, the runes flashing with a jaunty little tune. With her strangely improved memory, she was able to translate it, and when she finished, she smiled. The message had read:

HELLO WORLD! I AM WORKING.

Malz laughed to herself, some alien memory adding a sense of familiarity to the idea of what she was doing. She was setting up conditions for the expression of magic, but using logic to do so.

She felt her mana drain a little as a new set of dozens of separate branches appeared, more complex than the first but most stemming from the same basic inputs. There were also inputs on inputs, which seemed to be meant for numbers once she took a closer look. Curiously there was also an option to CREATE TIER 1 BLANK.

Above them, greyed-out branches of even more complexity appeared, their runes tantalizing her with hints about what those functions would control once she reached them. One of the central trees seemed to be for hiding scripts, which had all sorts of implications about what Kiryu might intend.

New notes appeared on the left, along with an empty bar that led to the word SEARCH written in sigil script on its right. To the right of that word was the word HELP.

Experimentally, she tried pressing the help button.

The message she got in sigil script read:

THIS IS LEVEL 1. IF YOU CAN’T FIGURE IT OUT, TURN AROUND.

Not very helpful, she muttered to herself.

Malz turned, and she found the word QUIT hovering behind her on its own screen opposite the challenges.

Yeah, no. She turned back around and cracked her neck, only to find there wasn’t much sensation in the gesture. It was time to get to work...

This is going to be exciting!

What felt like hours after starting, Malz was no longer excited.

She’d input the same start command more than a dozen times, but when it came to the later commands, she found herself constantly flummoxed. She’d gotten through some of the simpler trees, and those had lit up blue when she succeeded, but more and more she was getting trees that lit up red before dumping all her efforts and forcing her to start from scratch.

If only there was a way to copy and paste these damn functions... she thought as she looked at the basic On-Off script that had started her journey.

Suddenly, the script lit up green. When she looked at the function she had been working on, the basic script copied itself into the appropriate slots as she "flexed" her thoughts to place it there.

Hidden tricks, huh? she thought, before realizing how alien the notion of copy-paste was to her. Sure, she’d done a lot of copy work when it came to her task in the Executioner archives, but the word "paste" hadn’t been one she’d used often.

Regardless, if these alien memories were helping her, she’d take them.

All the better to fly again, until she could get her hands on an ankhestis potion or the like.

Laughing to herself, Malz resumed her task.

*

Ferro paced as he waited for Malz and Anko to finish their work.

He knew what they were going through since it had taken him hours to finish the first tier of complexity before he decided to quit. According to Kiryu, the first level was enough that he would "probably be safe" when using the more complex scripts that his suit could generate - all pre-programmed by Kiryu.

From there, Kiryu spent a great deal of time filling in Ferro’s knowledge gaps and walking him through some basic tests to increase his efficiency. It had been a lot to learn, but Ferro already had the basics from his study of Kir Gale’s magic instructions.

The best thing Ferro discovered about his suit was that it was designed to store magic, and thus he was able to circumvent the limits of his ability to express magic by having the suit do magic for him, while his continuous throughput of mana kept it filled. It was less flexible than casting himself, but just the idea of having access to the magic of the strongest mages - and more besides - filled him with joy and a sense of worth and power.

Sadly, even after refining his understanding, he found that flight was very taxing on his mana. The concept of negating gravity was just too weird for him to wrap his mind around. This meant that, while he could fly, he couldn’t do anything else like shield himself or use offensive spells once the suit’s store of mana ran out. The amount he could store in his body might let him use one or two attacks, but drawing from his body meant he would cast without the suit, and put himself at risk of interrupting the mana flow for flight.

Kiryu suggested he focus on ground combat before "going three-dee," whatever that meant. Contextually Ferro understood, but he had tasted flight and now he wanted more...

A tiny gasp was all the warning he got that Malz was back, before she groaned and rose from where she’d been laid.

"How long was I-"

"Five hours and fifty-one minutes. A new record," Kiryu declared after hitting the button on his stopwatch. "How’d you do?"

"I think I got about halfway into Tier Two before my brain started melting," Malz said.

"That’s further than me!" Ferro congratulated her, patting her on the back gently. "I stopped right after Tier One."

"You’ll need to actually create a lot more scripts before you can connect to Tiers Three, Four, and Five," Kiryu said. "Consider it a puzzle for future generations."

"Your notes aren’t very helpful, by the way," Malz scowled.

"That’s what the Search function is for."

"It’s broken," Malz shot back.

"No, it isn’t. Try searching by script sets next time."

"That’s completely counterintuitive!" Malz complained.

"If you don’t like it, make your own," Kiryu scowled back. "Kids these days... ungrateful little..."

Ferro scratched the back of his head guiltily. He’d figured out the Search function mostly by accident, and had discovered a few shortcuts for how to input commands and even change base settings.

Afterward, during their wait, Kiryu offhandedly mentioned that the settings for most irrational constants were intentionally accurate to only within a thousandth. He didn’t want neophytes stumbling into something more efficient than what they could handle.

For example, something too efficient at drawing in mana could drain a person dry and damage their gate. Something too efficient at storing mana would be like carrying a bomb around if it ever got damaged in just the wrong way - which could be done with focused casting or even sheer brute force.

Just the idea of these dangers had kept Ferro from delving back into the sigil core, even after Kiryu explained the process.

Malz and Kiryu had barely stopped bickering when suddenly Anko shot up with a huge gasp.

The look on her face terrified Ferro into jumping as he saw the veins in her eyes and the hostile unsheathing of her claws.

Kiryu was far more calm about it as he drew up the stopwatch, simply stating, "Twenty-five hours. How far did you get?"

"Barely through Tier One before I quit. Why’d you make everything so damn hard?!" Anko shouted. "I had to keep writing the same things over and over and over!"

"Didn’t you figure out how to copy and paste?" Malz asked.

"Or how to search for scripts to copy?" Ferro added.

"Bwuh?" Anko made a face of complete disgust.

The sound of suppressed chuckling drew everyone’s attention. Off to the side, Kiryu put his hand over his mouth as his laughter built, rising to a demented cackle — one that made Ferro’s hackles rise and his fur stand on end.

"It’s too much... Monkeys typing Shakespeare... Ahahah! Hah-HAH-Hah hah..."

None of them had any idea what Kiryu was talking about, but eventually, he wound down to a stop, wiping a tear from his eye that came with another blob of the strange mana material leaking from his body.

"Alright," Kiryu said to Malz and Anko. "Put your suits on and we’ll start your training. I don’t have a lot of time to whip you into shape." Suddenly he looked past them at the wall of his shelter, as if peering through it. "Well now... Looks like we have company." He waved a hand and the concrete wall suddenly showed an illusion of what was going on beyond it.

Coming over the ridge was a group of myriadfolk, who had all spread out to surround the house on one side. And a familiar-looking giant of a woman watching from the back.

"Friends of yours?" Kiryu looked at the three of them, an eyebrow raised as he produced his pipe once more and started smoking.

Ferro, Anko, and Malz looked at each other, a bad feeling rising in all their guts.

"""No,""" they said at the same time.