The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 432: Avalanche

Chapter 432: Avalanche

After a night of rest, Anko felt pretty good.

Things were much less stressful after Malz apologized, and they both found themselves thanking Ferro for keeping them together. The next morning, they resumed their walk toward the southeast, marching through the freshly packed snow while Ferro produced a consistent stream of heat in front of them to make walking easy without setting everything on fire.

In truth, Anko had been terrified of winding up alone. She’d already spent most of her life alone on the streets of Norneau, even now, and even if she was just a half-demon, she looked enough like a full demon to draw the ire of anyone that didn’t like demons...

Although being able to cast spells with the suit-thing Kiryu had given her was going a long way to helping her confidence that she could take care of herself-

A thin, precise bolt of magic suddenly lanced outward, disrupting her thoughts as, nearby, a rabbit made its death cry.

Malz pointed it out to Ferro before they went to retrieve it, with Malz looking particularly impressed by herself as she inspected the perfect hole she’d shot into its chest.

"Right in the heart. How’d you do that?" Anko asked as Ferro removed the body to start dressing it.

"I’ve been putting sigil core functions into the suit, it’s pretty easy once you’ve memorized the system. That’s a very weak spell, so even an untrained mage could resist it with mana alone, but I was able to make it target-seeking once cast. I was thinking of calling it magic mis-"

"What? You can do that?!" Anko interrupted. She had a pretty decent idea what ’target-seeking’ meant, but more importantly she’d spent so many hours setting up her sigil core that she hoped it had to be more than just a damn test. The notion of the sigil core codes being useful had slightly escaped her, and when Malz and Ferro talked about the sequences and what they could do, they descended into what seemed like another language entirely, quickly boring her.

"I talked with Ferro about it last night. Or did you not overhear that while you were eavesdropping?" Malz asked with her sardonic voice. That was a word Anko had gotten used to in a hurry, after accusing Malz of sarcasm and learning the difference, back in the desert.

"Nope!" Anko answered. "Or if I did, I probably forgot after you told us about your boyfriend’s massive-"

"Alright!" Malz blushed. "Do you want me to show you how? You can definitely do more since you have two wrist things."

"Yeah!" Anko preened a bit, pushing her dark purple hair aside and looking at both her lower arms where the controls for her suit’s functions were.

Malz took one of her wrists and pressed her fingers against the control. "It slides open like this," Malz said, revealing a bunch of little keys with sigil core runes on them. "If you go into your sigil core, you can test out sequence combinations and make custom spells. Once you have a combination you like, just type it in, and the suit will record it."

Hearing Malz talk about it, Anko felt the presence of the sigil core in her head like a tiny pressure between her brain parts. "I’m gonna try it right now!"

"Wait!"

Malz was too late. Anko "pushed" at the sigil core with her thoughts and felt herself get drawn into its weird grey space.

For some reason, she felt a bit of cold on her cheek, but she ignored it as she excitedly approached the menu.

But what to pick?

Anko really liked the flamethrower spell. But what if she could make it better?

She spun through the different branches until she found it, a giggle escaping her lips as she saw how the ends of the branches could be connected to other sigil sequences. Concentrating on the very end - the "output" - she realized she could put sequences from elsewhere at the end of it. She pulled back to search, quickly running into a cluster of sequences that seemed perfect for attack spells.

"What if I try this, and this, and, ooh, I like that."

She started testing out the sequences - copying them one sigil at a time as she realized she’d forgotten to ask about "copy-and-pasting." It was a little slow going, but she got one sequence to light up as functional before-

"Anko, wake up!" SLAP!

The flat of Malz’s hand tore Anko out of the sigil core mindspace, and she opened her eyes to find... nothing wrong?

They couldn’t even last five minutes without me? She was about to feel offended when she saw the look of fear on Malz’s face.

"We have to move!" Malz urged.

"Why?" Anko asked, discovering the right side of her face felt tense and cold as she was hauled to her feet. Or she would have been if Malz wasn’t as weak as a small child. Instead, she pushed up with her lower arms, and only on her feet did she notice the ground was rumbling.

Looking in the direction the rumbling seemed to be coming from, she saw a billowing cloud of white approaching at speed.

"Hurry!" Ferro’s voice called out, and Anko looked up to find him hovering above the tree line.

"Fly me up!" Malz said.

Anko let out a string of complaints as she pulled Malz into an awkward hug, careful of her wing, before figuring out which wrist had the flight button on it. She pushed it and leaped into the air moments before the cloud reached them.

Beneath the hovering trio, white, rolling boulders and clouds of snow in a long wave passed into the trees, snapping the nearest ones but quickly dissipating as more and more obstacles stole the wave’s energy.

"What the hell is that?" Anko asked as she stared at the destructive wave.

"An avalanche, I believe they’re called," Malz said. "I’m really starting to hate snow."

"What caused it?" Anko asked.

An angry howl reverberated from higher up the mountains. It drew the trio’s eyes to the massive wolf standing between two peaks, a wolf whose fur had been entirely replaced with needle-like bones covered in ice, with an angry, pulsing blue core that could be seen through the thin flesh of its chest.

Mist rose from the wolf in a perpetual cloud, and the scraggly bushes next to the monster were still in the process of freezing over with every droplet that touched them.

A new question formed on Anko’s lips. "What the fuck is that?!"

"I-I think that’s a nebula lupus. It’s a type of monster, similar to mist wolf spirits, and they’re only supposed to be allowed to live in Diurnus."

"Well, it’s very alive right here!" Anko said as she hovered up to arrive on the level with Ferro. "What do we do?"

"We run," Ferro answered. Taking Anko by the hand and turning, he began to drag her and Malz through the air until Anko tilted into her flight enough to keep pace.

"Why can’t you fly?" Anko finally thought to ask Malz.

"I deleted the flight function to make space for more. The suits can only keep so many, and I was able to replace it with a half-dozen others," Malz justified herself. "Besides, once I reach the third tier, I can just replace it."

From what Anko had seen, the second tier of the sigil core codes looked at least twice as complex as the first, which meant Malz was just casually talking about an inconceivable amount of time coding spells that she could put in her suit. But of course, she was smarter than Anko, growing up in Heaven and all.

Suddenly, a lance of ice shot past Anko. All thought ceased as she instinctively rolled to the side, dodging another trio of lances.

Looking back, she saw the nebula lupus was following them.

And it had friends.

Silent wolves loped through the forest, weaving amidst the trees like little clouds of blue-white death. They had an ethereal quality to them that didn’t quite seem real to Anko, and their silence made them only more eerie.

"Why are there more of them!?" Anko shouted as a burst of flame up ahead came from Ferro. One of the eerie wolves had climbed up a tree and leaped for him, biting him on the arm before he turned his flamethrower against it.

The ephemeral thing fell back, already disintegrating even before it struck the ground and burst into a cloud of moisture that quickly froze against the nearest trees. Anko sensed that dealing with the nebula wolf’s friends up close would be dangerous.

"The other ones aren’t real! More like tools made of magic. Nebula lupus are said to form from spirit wolves that lose their packs, corrupted by sadness and loss and being alone."

Anko felt a tinge of sorrow at Malz’s words. She knew what it was like to live alone, and she hated it. Hated how she’d put up with people who used and didn’t care about her, just to survive in a city where she was barely acknowledged as existing. She could barely remember the one gang she’d tried to run with, until she’d grown a bit older and they’d gotten all weird about it.

But that didn’t matter right now. She couldn’t let it matter, not with her friends in danger. And sure, she was still kindof annoyed with Malz, but they’d both made up, so they were back to being friends. She had no idea what she would have done if things had gone otherwise. Probably just be friends with Ferro, even if he was a bit of a girly-girl... for a boy... and never talk to Malz again...

She shook her head free of these thoughts, returning her senses to the present. She could feel that between her mana and the suit, she’d only have a couple more minutes of flight before she’d lose all the mana she had for spells. She’d still be able to enhance herself, but against the bursting mana-wolf-things...

She needed a plan. And Malz was better at plans.

"How do we kill it?" Anko asked.

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