The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 433: Running From Wolves

Chapter 433: Running From Wolves

"I’m not sure how to kill it!" Malz shouted as Anko jerked her out of the way of another set of ice spikes. "We should focus on getting away!"

Ferro was already working on that, trying to bring them further south.

As they dodged and fled, Malz tried to consider their options. Her suit felt close to half-full mana wise, but she’d used it far less than Ferro and Anko. The homeostasis functions, while they’d been walking through the cold, didn’t drain the suits much, but they had slowed the rate at which the suits would store mana.

And the suits had a lot of functions in addition to a versatility Heaven would have killed for. The lightness of the material, its durability and ability to self-repair - as Ferro had confirmed when ripping the crotch of his open in order to urinate - were comparable to godflesh without any of the setbacks. Like needing to lose part of one’s flesh to incorporate it.

But for all their benefits, their limits were something they had to deal with now.

And one of those limits was staring her in the face.

Just behind the nape of Ferro’s neck, the bar centered on the back of his suit collar was descending from orange to dark red.

It’s because he cleared the path for us, Malz realized. If they’d been more cautious, they would have conserved more mana for their suits, perhaps relying on Ferro’s magic instead. But they hadn’t known to be cautious since Malz had assumed the snowstorm would drive anything dangerous into hiding.

She’d only ever heard of snow before coming to Ayther, but Anko had lived in a city and didn’t trust her own experience. Not when Malz had been trained in survival. In other words, she’d made a bad call, and now she was the only person with enough energy in her suit to potentially save them from their situation.

"H-hey! Watch it!" Anko yelped as Malz climbed along the demon to get a peek at the back of her collar. Her battery light was already in the red.

"Shit." Why was Anko’s suit already in the red? She’d used it less than Ferro... It’s because she’s carrying me. Malz needed to decide now, and she needed everyone to be aware of what the situation was. Against a foe like the one below them, with her magic as useless as it was at the moment, running was still their only option, and flight was the best way to do that.

If only there were a way to transfer mana between...

"I’ve got it!" Malz shouted. "Ferro, Anko, I’m going to need you both to keep me flying."

As Ferro slowed a bit to match their speed and height, Anko reached across his shoulder, bracing herself against both of her companions.

"Your suits are running low. I’m going to try to make a spell to charge them!" Malz said. "Keep me up for just a couple of minutes!"

"What?" Ferro blurted, but Anko used her lower arm to smack him.

"Do what she says!" the half-demon shouted.

Malz was already diving into her sigil core, quickly searching through the functions for something that would transfer mana. Within moments, she had a number of sequences pulled up.

"Come on, come on..." she muttered to herself. "No!"

The most available spell that seemed to be what she wanted was a second-tier sequence. It was described as being for recharging sigil core enchantments and combined multiple arrays from tier one with more complex if-then sequences for-

"Safeties... they’re safety protocols..."

Malz took in as much as she could. If she excluded the safety protocols... the rate variators... the stop sequence...

"I can do this... I can do this..." Malz flung herself into combining first-tier sequences. It was really quite simple to organize, but she was limited in how complex she could make sequences until she finished unlocking the next tier.

The moment she finished, she turned around and left the sigil core with a jerk... just in time to see the tip of a pine tree coming for her.

"Ahhh!" she screamed as she was pulled upward.

"Malz, is back!" Anko exclaimed.

"We’re barely in the air," Ferro reported.

Looking down, Malz saw even more of the spectral wolves.

"I need my hands!" she said, there was almost no time.

Ferro dug his shoulder into her as she wrested her left arm in front of her face. It was slightly easier with her right as Anko’s two left arms moved to compensate.

Malz opened up her wrist interface and hurried to input the sequence she’d come up with. The moment it was in, she cycled the wrist icons and tapped it, feeling a slight wave of nausea as the suit did more than drain its mana towards her palms.

Ignoring the feeling, she slapped her hands onto her companion’s backs, and almost immediately, they started to rise.

"Haha!" Anko cheered as they cleared the treetops.

Closer to the coast, there was a thin belt of green stretching along the eastern shore before the rocky beaches and cliffs, some of which stretched outward and upward with black and grey stone capped by moss and shrubs.

Malz saw very little of that. As the mana drained out of her body, her head started to feel lighter, and a splitting headache watered her eyes. She heard Ferro exclaim, "We did it! They gave up!"

"Oh good," Malz chuckled deliriously, her head lolling upward as she saw something that didn’t belong. "What’s that, though?" she asked before mana deprivation stole the last of her senses.

*

The moment Malz passed out, Ferro felt the flow of mana into their suits end. He had a few seconds to look ahead to where Malz seemed to have been looking before he saw it. A thin line of cyan and blue, with shades of green. It reached into the sky, through the clouds, and through a few breaks, he saw it spreading out from the top like a tree made of spider webs or a fountain frozen mid-burst.

It was unlike anything he’d ever seen.

"What is that supposed to be?" Anko asked as she hefted Malz into her upper arms, clearly enhancing herself to carry the unconscious angel.

"I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyone building higher than the tower lords," Ferro answered. "I hope it’s not a bad sign."

"It’s just a thing. We can figure it out once we get there," Anko shrugged, which seemed a bit weird when she did it with just her lower arms. "It’ll probably be better than the last place we came from."

"Why do you say that?" Ferro asked as he began to follow her along the shore. He felt foolish the moment Anko reminded him...

"Because that place blew up. Also, things were all weird and complicated and political. And that was just on Maledict’s side. From what Malz tells me, it was like that on the angel side, too, but worse because everyone smiled about it. At least with demons, most of the time they just fight it out if it’s not obvious who will win."

"I thought you liked Maledict," Ferro said.

"I do! It’s just... I don’t like it when everything’s all complicated. I owe his son, and I want to pay that debt. Even if that means I gotta beat up that guy who looks like him."

"In the suit he made for you?" Ferro shook his head, marveling at how Anko could stay cheerful despite their latest near-death experience.

"Hey, if he wants to make it easier for me to do that, I’ll let him. He was mean to my friends." She shook her head, a gesture that made Ferro think she thought Kiryu was the idiot despite all the evidence to the contrary.

He was no less informed than her, with the exception that Kir would have a part to play in his destiny and that that destiny waited for him and the moment he met his sister once more... on the day she died. But the Oracle had also said that time was changeable...

He blinked away the thoughts before noting Anko’s smile.

"You sound much happier than we were in the desert," Ferro noted.

"I’m happy because I’m alive! Because I’m home, even if I’m a thousand great measures away! And I got to see Kir again, even if he’s being possessed by a big jerk."

"How does that even work? Demonic possession." He wondered if there was a way to defeat that sort of thing. Though, from what Kiryu said, was he even demonic? He’d said he was just a man.

"I dunno. The cubi were very secretive about it. Or at least Janice was. She said something confusing stuff about it being like loosening up and being tight at the same time? I didn’t really get- Uh... Are you alright?"

Ferro sputtered through his awkward cough. "That’s not the sort of... How old are you, even?"

"Uhh... sixteen, I think?" Anko paused. "Seventeen. Probably."

As they continued walking along the shore, Ferro tried to reconcile how, for her age, Anko could be both incredibly simple and yet utterly complex at the same time.

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