The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 417: The Dragon and the Sovereign

Chapter 417: The Dragon and the Sovereign

The nameless creature circled the crack in reality - a place too small for it to fit into without collapsing it, that much it could sense. But it could feel its prey. The fox that had spread herself into this land. She was inside, dying without a direct connection to the uncountable life forms that lived in her domain.

The dragon was patient. He had not lasted for uncountable turnings of the seasons for nothing.

He had weathered calamities - had caused more than a few himself - in his quest to evolve. From creature to monster. From monster to spirit. From spirit to sovereign of a territory that had not been unlike this, if much warmer and rainier.

And when half his land had collapsed in fire, destroyed by no more than the simple churning of the world’s continental plates, he had freed himself to become something else.

A leviathan of the sky. Lord of whichever place he claimed.

And then they came.

The little birds with their sharp, metal claws clad in dark mana.

Century after century they came. Fighting him in circles from one land to the next, on the great continent far to the west of where he now found himself. A continent so rich in mana it could sustain him even without a permanent hold - though of course, he claimed a large enough stretch of mountains to rest when he felt the need for some peace.

He craved that peace, even if it meant displacing this land’s sovereign. The little birds had come, but unlike before they’d kept attacking. Day after day.

Unrelenting.

He sensed their wants.

His power. His mana. His very being.

The little birds had killed sovereigns and lesser spirits. He’d felt the little quakes in the balance of the continent. The sudden gaps. The upstart replacements.

He’d thought himself untouchable.

And then a strange little bird had come.

Had copied his lightning. Fought through his defenses.

The bird had taken a piece of him. The bird with false flesh. Half-spirit and yet not. The blue-haired bird, whose sword had been heavier than the others.

How he hated that little lightning bird.

But at the moment the dragon lost his horn, he’d wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

His mana had obliged, doing the impossible once, but the sense of violation - and the expense of the feat - had left him drained. Unable to fathom how a perfect being such as himself could be violated at all.

He had been above the strife of lesser spirits, but once his being had been shorn, it was as if the entire continent had turned upon him.

First had come the rocs, eager to reclaim their mountains. Then the phoenixes, when he’d thought to hide in the lands that were once his domain.

When he’d alighted during a gap in the fighting, hiding in a volcano, the magma wasps had been the worst. Mindless, undauntable, and innumerable. One queen with a hundred daughters and unlimited lesser spirits.

The sheer number of stingers that had wormed their way through his body - even after the deaths of those that had stung him - had left the ocean hissing as he fled above it.

Across waters that teemed with lesser spirits.

He’d tried to feast, but from the depths rose a leviathan of dark waters. A great whale that had become more. Horns attuned to pure ice. A body attuned to pure air. A form sheathed in water.

Their fight would have destroyed mountains, had there been any nearby, for the leviathan had proved quite able to pursue the dragon into the sky. Its ponderous, nigh-glacial mass had lifted from the waters like an island of flesh.

Its million-fanged maw had sought to bite him. To crush him.

But what the dragon had lacked in mass, it made up for with power. In concentrating its might into the lightning that carved into his foe’s bulk, stripping spirit-flesh and causing a frenzy in the waters below.

And a storm in the sky above.

It was the storm that drew the tempest rocs. The great birds with their lightning, a perfect match to resist his power. They’d assailed the leviathan and him alike, claiming the storm for their own while the sun rose and set many times on their battle.

Without the power of a domain, and with so many contesting the space for its mana, the battle had soon swung in the favor of the newcomers, forcing him to flee lest he be overwhelmed. He knew that there had been little chance of consuming the leviathan’s heartstone - protected as it was by the sheer volume of the leviathan spirit’s bulk. Leastwise not before it dove to safety.

That bulk was the greater prize in the eyes of the raptors, and the dragon escaped the battle with mostly superficial wounds, but at the great expense of mana. He neither knew nor cared if that opponent lived, for challenging the greatest spirits of the sea had never proven worth the risk.

With every new stretch of ocean, however, those beasts challenged him. Wore him down. And then more of the birds had come.

The moment the dragon had sighted land, the birds had come at him in force. More brutal than the magma wasps, because the wounds they made refused to heal right. The flesh returned, but the paths of mana through the dragon’s body were altered, making his lightning weaker, more erratic, and even causing him to hurt himself when he flooded the sky with it, trying to just kill them all.

He’d succeeded but crashed onto the forested shore in a heap, passing out for days.

He awoke to a world with only one moon.

The green one was gone, but he saw the dispersed cloud of its fragments. Their distant mana drawing closer.

Then she had come.

The sovereign spirit.

A mere fox, and yet more.

She wielded her authority to demand his departure, but the dragon did not survive crossing the ocean to fall now. Their fight had shaken the mountains and valleys. His lightning-sparked fires filled the sky with smoke.

This land was not rich in mana, and all of it belonged to the fox, but what the dragon could not take from the life of this domain, he reaped from its death. Enough power to more than put the fox in her place. And yet, at what should have been their final battle, the fox had received a surge of power from somewhere distant.

Enough that it had been able to escape here. To the tear in the world.

When the three lesser beings had come, the half-spirit and her two animal companions, the dragon had thought them a snack at best, until he sensed the mana of the sovereign in one. But more than that, barely a wisp against the backdrop of the tiny half-spirit’s dense mana, was a tinge of something familiar.

Something blue.

Like the little bird that had started everything.

The dragon’s rage flared in that moment of realization, that the horn-taker was connected somehow to the little fox.

He did not have words or knowledge to place his feelings, but he knew intrinsically that he could not allow the little fox to live. If she lived, then the string of misfortune that had haunted him since the little bird took his horn would only continue. The dragon believed this with all his being.

And when he had crunched her bones into dust between his teeth, he would do the same to her companions, no matter how poor in mana they were. And he would do the same with every being like them. Every group. Every hive. He would make it his mission to destroy the wingless little gnats that resembled the lightning bird.

And so he’d twisted himself around the wound in the world, to block her entry. To finally taste once more that he was a predator - not prey. Never again! Never prey!

Oh, how close he had been... before another sovereign had appeared. A nine-tailed fox in crimson fur, his spirit reeking of sloth and the worship of his lesser. A paltry shadow of the freedom the dragon had won through millennia of combat, and yet enough to physically move him.

What came next was an exercise in frustration as the fox tackled him, only to refuse engaging after that initial strike. Instead, they went skittering around with fakes made of fire that barely hurt to bite, yet were annoying all the same.

By the time the dragon finished with the last of the fakes, the second sovereign had fled into the same tear in reality that the dragon could not fit into.

Compared to a century, the amount of time that passed was no time at all before something happened. Mana gathered from the domain of the silver fox began to approach the portal, before suddenly the domain was no more.

Not in the sense of disappearing, for the forest and its denizens still lived, but in the sense that everything the sovereign had been was now concentrated into a singular being. To know this, the dragon had taken a risk, adding a tiny thread of his own mana into the flow and spying on the realm within.

And what he saw confused him.

The silver sovereign had invested herself entirely in the half-spirit from before.

All that power, now in a single, bite-sized form.

The dragon licked his lips and prepared to wait.

There was no way such a tiny being could grasp the totality of what the sovereign had been. And sure enough, she began to die from it.

He had only to wait for it.

If she emerged, he would eat her while she was weakened.

If she did not, he would reap this land for all of its mana before moving on to the next.

The dark pulse of corruption in his heart told him it was possible. But though that was just a sliver of his will, he knew how strongly it called. For it was as he had always been.

A predator. Never prey. Not to two sovereigns or two hundred. Not to little lightning birds or those lesser beings that skittered along the dirt.

But beneath all of it, a survivor, by any means necessary.

And now, by means of revenge.