The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 421: Mud Elf

Chapter 421: Mud Elf

"On my mark, we jump," Reiko said as the final moment neared.

Akane, contrary to her general demeanor, had a serious look on her face. Underneath that facade, however, she was a mess of conflicting thoughts and emotions as she sorted out what she’d been asked to do.

Find a spot. Make a fort. Easy victory. She gulped. She’d never had an easy victory in her life. Especially not in any of the perennial clashes with the mage lords of her region. She’d even been nicknamed "Muda Elf" as a cruel pun in High East Rethani because all she was good for was playing in the mud - at least according to her commanders, siblings, and her mother’s councilors.

What if the dragon is too big though? What if it doesn’t take the bait? I’m too young to die!

"Jump!"

"W-wait-whoa!" Akane made panicked noises as she half-jumped half-stumbled through the portal leading out, mere minutes ahead of whatever phenomenon the cultists had unleashed after reaching their destination - the midpoint of the Path of Blood That Seeks Hell, a notoriously difficult dungeon that was the heart of her home city, Sahin.

It was a place for warriors to prove themselves... and the place where she’d only managed to confirm her cowardice.

The prospect of failing again twisted itself through her gut even before she fell face-first into the dirt outside the dungeon, rolling to a stop on her back against the stump of a felled tree.

She looked up and saw death.

A dragon larger than any other she’d ever seen, serpentine in a way she’d thought only existed in the symbols of Retha, stared down at her with one cruel eye.

"Oh gods! What am I supposed to do?! What were my orders? What were my orders?!"

The dragon, coiled like a spring, launched itself at her. Akane squealed in terror, covering her face as she surged her mana into the ground, pulling a protective dome of earth over herself and falling most of a measure as she pulled from the ground underneath herself.

She was blinded by darkness for the bare moment it took for the dragon to collide with the dome, which crumbled right as a blazing bolt of lightning formed in its mouth.

Just as it was about to fry her, a shield snapped into place around the dragon’s jaws. The lightning, unable to be pushed out, surged backward into the dragon, emitting from several points along its long body as the beast was forced to reabsorb its own attack.

As it roared in rage, Reiko appeared, holding hands as she hovered all three of her bodies on a shield.

"Are you alright?" the gestalt asked.

"I forgot what I’m supposed to do!" Akane wailed.

"Cup game!" Reiko shouted as the dragon pried its jaws outward, breaking her shielding spell.

Cup game! That’s right! Akane scrambled out of the hole and started dashing around the edge of the fight. She stopped at a relatively clear patch of dirt and shoved her mana into it, producing a simple tower fortress of roughly two stories before she forced out the water inside, hardening it.

Her preferred style of quick fortification was three measures wide and roughly hexagonal, with crenelations and an inset ladder in the middle that allowed for relatively easy climbing. She didn’t spend a single moment past what was necessary to create it before abandoning her work and heading for the next mostly clear spot and putting up another tower.

The plan, now that she remembered it, was simple. Reiko needed cover for her bigger offensive spells, and Crimson was mostly an illusionist trickster. Once Akane had enough forts up, they would combine their efforts to confuse the dragon and bring it down, rotating attacks to keep it guessing.

As she ran in a long arc, Akane had to admit to herself that Reiko was pretty amazing.

The gestalt was managing to hold her own against the dragon with nothing but basic shielding magic. Only it wasn’t basic. The more Akane got a look at her shields, the more she noticed that she’d built them as lattices - almost the exact same method Akane used to rapidly organize the structure of her forts, only Akane used regular triangles as part of a three-dimensional structure instead of hexagons in two dimensions.

The most fascinating thing was that Reiko also spun her shields, and it took her a few more towers to realize it made sense from the standpoint of distributing damage across the entire lattice instead of risking a break in any one spot.

Had she not been honor-bound to help Reiko in this life-or-death struggle, she would have definitely waxed in despair over the unfairness of genius on display. As such, she pushed the motes of jealousy away as she focused on making as many fortifications as possible, ignoring the strain on her mana as much as possible as the end of her role came in sight.

The moment she arrived at the first tower she’d made, she found Reiko standing there holding up a big ball of light that resembled a large force-emitting spell.

"Do we need more towers?" Akane gasped, reaching out to touch the gestalt’s rabbitkin on the shoulder only to find it was an illusion. She quickly withdrew the hand, not wanting to risk disrupting the spell any further, and that was when she saw that behind her second tower was another copy of Reiko.

Turning about, she saw Crimson duck into the shadows about four towers behind, before bounding for the next tower as a lightning bolt scorched the tips of his tails.

Looking up, she realized that Reiko was no longer in the sky, and she worried for a long moment before suddenly a prismatic swirl of elemental magic crashed into the dragon’s face, drawing his ire at the last moment.

With a lash of his tail, the dragon smashed the fortress from which the spell came from, before diving face-first at the illusion of Reiko that remained behind it. The dragon barely raised its head from the dirt when Crimson cut loose with a concentrated beam of fire magic that left a jagged, scorched line along the belly scales of the serpentine spirit.

Before the dragon could counterattack, another tangle of elemental force hit the dragon from behind, notably with fewer colors to it as Reiko homed in on the most effective element for dealing with the monster.

Akane spent a precious moment crowing with excitement before everything went wrong.

The dragon, realizing that it was getting nowhere trying to target its attackers one at a time, reared up into the sky above the portal, a massive ball of blue-purple energy forming in front of his mouth before a sudden deluge of lightning broke cracked forth, bolts striking tower after tower and disintegrating them and the illusions behind them.

Forced to shield herself, Reiko couldn’t move as the bolts began to converge on her, the dragon turning to face her as it brought the deadly orb closer to the true target of its ire, the stray bolts keeping Crimson from closing as the kyubi unleashed another blast of fire, only to be ignored despite the damage he was doing to the dragon.

It was like the dragon really wanted Reiko dead.

Without thinking, Akane burst out of her cover, mentally composing the structure of what she would need to save Reiko. As Reiko’s shield started to shatter at the edges, she leaped and plunged her hands into the earth. Sparing nothing, she drew up bedrock as she forced the earth to form a massive dome around the dragon’s head. The ball of lightning as it impacted her wall burst, harming the dragon who tried to writhe backward and away from her trap, only to fail for a crucial moment as the stone pinned it in place.

In the throes of its capture, the dragon twisted its body about, and Akane barely avoided getting struck as its length passed over her head, only to smash into Crimson as the kyubi tried to move towards Reiko.

As Reiko took the lucky break to dash around Akane’s dome, mana deprivation finally caught up to Akane and she pitched sideways, nausea overtaking her as she threw up bile and shuddered while a cold sweat broke out over her skin.

As soon as she could, Reiko started dashing towards the dragon, barely managing to hold hands as mana flowed into her bodies. They leaped simultaneously for the space between the dragon’s shoulders.

No... Get away... Akane prayed as the mysterious onmyoji landed on the dragon’s back, before suddenly planting all six hands on it.

Finally free of the stone, the dragon twisted on itself to gaze threateningly at its quarry, its face marred by the destruction wrought by its lightning.

Akane felt her hope die as the wounds on the dragon began to heal, and she realized that against all logic, Reiko was the source of that healing.

Was she insane? Had she decided to give her life over to the dragon? Did she think the dragon would spare her if she gave it just a bit of succor?

In the uncertainty of the moment, Akane strangely began to notice the familiar stickiness of mud on her cheek. Tears rose into her eyes as she realized that for all their efforts, failure was imminent. She’d survived and fought only to die in a strange land, covered in mud.

Useless.

Insufficient.

A waste of effort...

I really was just... muda.

A choked, strangled roar that suddenly cut off drew Akane’s eyes from the dirt.

Reiko’s bodies had fallen far from where they’d been, clutching their heads before something finally seemed to give and they passed out, leaving Akane alone to witness the most horrifying death she’d never even conceived of.

The dragon’s wounds had healed over, and so had its eyes, its nostrils, its mouth. All were covered in flesh and malformed scales, and the dragon twisted along the ground as it tried to escape its inescapable suffocation, its own body turned against it from a magic Akane did not understand.

Its struggles brought it undulating into the air and across the ground, snapping trees as it rolled through the world at random. Suddenly, it rose straight up, blue lightning gathering within until at the apex of its rise the lightning burst out of its mouth and throat in equal measure.

Akane thought there could be no way any creature could survive such damage, and yet as the dragon collapsed, she saw it inhale one final breath before it collided with the side of the mountain, its body uncoiling along the stone before the dragon lay still, corrupted blood and mana-rich fluids leaking from its self-created orifices.

Forcing herself to stand, Akane gulped - regretting it immediately as she tasted bile - and looked at the fallen forms of Reiko.

The only thing she could think was that the dragon had been less terrifying than the onmyoji.