The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 438: The Chariot

Chapter 438: The Chariot

Kiryu had a hard time suppressing his anger at the "scientists" he found beneath the prison levels.

Of course, he did stop at the prison levels to vaporize the jailors and open all the cells, but it looked like his hosts weren’t as into keeping prisoners as he assumed; which meant the Executioners were probably more of a "disappear the problem" type. He did spot the guy whose hookah bar got trashed, so, after verifying he didn’t have any family to bring with him, he did a quick teleport to drop the guy off at Norneau with a tiny sack of gold before popping back in.

But when he got to the "scientists..."

"God you fucks are so full of shit down here," Kiryu said as he pushed their leader, a bald angel with brown wings, towards a console. From everything he saw and learned, they were more like glorified maintenance staff. No experiments, just running and maintaining the systems. "Not one of you thought that a dungeon turning inside out was worth going into?"

"We’ve been more worried about keeping the crystallization effect from breaching Araqlun," the pale egghead sputtered.

Kiryu wasn’t having it. He’d tried going to the designated entrance for the old dungeon, only to find it sealed in crystal. He’d tried many means of boring into it, both physical and magical. And he’d even, in the dead of night, tried flying up to see if there was a crack or other form of entrance. He’d checked and rechecked every part of the crystal tower’s visible surface, and the only conclusion he could reach was that there was no entrance because the tower was incomplete.

"So turn it off. I’ve got a date."

"I can’t turn it off, they’ll have me killed!" the "scientist" protested.

"I could always kill you right now; quick and easy. But you’ve led me to believe you’re the only one with the codes. So use them." Kiryu placed a hand on the man’s wing, right at the join where it met his back. "Worry about your bosses later. After all, they couldn’t keep me out," he chuckled.

That was when one of the "scientists", perhaps emboldened by the way Kiryu kept his back to them, pulled a knife and tried to stab him in the back, only to watch in horror as the cheap low-carbon steel of his blade blunted before shattering against Kiryu’s magitech armor.

Kiryu turned just enough to punt the man backward into a wall with a burst of magical force - snapping both of the man’s wings - before returning his attention to the lead "scientist."

"Time’s ticking."

With a rush of fingers, the "scientist" opened the console and started bringing up systems. Kiryu had wondered how Araqlun sustained itself on a moon that definitely shouldn’t have had an atmosphere, and he caught a few answers as screen after screen opened.

Force fields. Multiples to keep the atmosphere contained for the city, and one very-offline one for the moon that no longer existed. Physical ones that did not react to the presence of mana, which meant they were entirely technical in operation, even if their power supply was...

"I-I’ve been locked out," the lead "scientist" reported, his console flashing red. "Without access, I can’t shut down the purity field keeping the crystal from expanding upwards...

"Yeah, I can see that," Kiryu scowled. "Let me see that," he didn’t wait for the angel to move out of the way before shoving him aside. Going back a few screens, he was able to identify the main source of power for all of Araqlun. Some sort of generator a lot more floors down. Practically, the core of the city, given how much space they were wasting on the bottom levels. "Guess I’ll just have to unplug everything."

"You can’t!" the angel next to him said. "If you destroy the power, Araqlun will-"

"You people have had a comfy ride for millennia," Kiryu scoffed. "Best you use the elevators before you break your ankles on the stairs."

That was their signal to go. Most of the other "scientists" had left the room already, except for the angel who’d tried to stab him. Kiryu didn’t care. Having finally found out what he needed, he returned to the stairwell and dropped the final distance, which turned out to be several floors up from where he wanted to be.

Figures they’d make it elevator-access-only.

Minutes later, he ripped open the elevator doors that led out to his final destination. A T-shaped junction, which led to two places. From his left, angels poured out of what looked like a control center from the brief glimpses he got through the sliding doors.

He vaporized them without any issue, except for one angel with four wings who needed to be shot five times to get through his shields.

Once that was done, he decided do eschew anything fancy and go for the room where he felt a large mass of mana, intending to simply destroy whatever powered the city and not give them a chance to turn it back on.

So he turned right, and walked into a nightmare.

White flesh, wired through with gold, hung from the ceiling, the walls, and even sloped upward from parts of the floor. Godflesh.

Arms and legs and feet and wings. Mouths and ears... And the eyes of a thousand corpses stared at him as he entered.

And centered in the dome of flesh was an angel, his body fused in such a way that it left only hints of his torso and wings visible. His face was almost entirely gripped by the godflesh that held his head against itself. And his was the only head attached to the whole mass. For a moment, Kiryu paused to contemplate the young man whose body had been taken to be a glorified generator.

"Abomination!" the whole room shouted in countless voices, all led by the angel in the center. The room began to rumble, which threw off Kiryu’s shot as he tried to plant a vaporizing speck of antimatter in the real abomination’s only head.

But instead of annihilating the whole thing, the only thing Kiryu managed to accomplish was to vaporize a beachball-sized knot of flesh that quickly began to fill itself back in.

"Ah shit," he swore, then dodged as the godflesh thing ripped a part of itself loose and tried to smash it into him.

Within moments, it was tearing itself free of the walls, alarms blaring everywhere as the lights shut down, only to be replaced by red emergency lights and a woman’s voice warning that some "pacification system" was activating.

If not for manasight, Kiryu would have been fighting blind as he avoided the creature’s lumbering strikes. Despite using the mana-enhanced reflexes of Kir’s body, he felt himself quickly starting to slow, along with the beast made of godflesh. He finally noticed the gaseous substance hissing into the room when the creature knocked him next to a vent.

Kiryu quickly put up his suit’s helmet, taking a massive, gasping breath, but the moment’s pause was all the creature needed for a follow-up strike that pushed Kiryu through the wall and into the unused underground of Araqlun’s lower dome.

He managed to plant a few more antimatter blasts but the thing kept coming, battering Kiryu through entire floor sections as the two became locked in mortal combat.

Eventually, however, they ran out of floor, and that was when Kiryu found himself rolling to a stop along the curve of the bottommost part of the city. A city that sounded not unlike a sinking ship as metal groaned and held against gravity and the crystal tower underneath.

"Fuck me for thinking this would be easy," Kiryu stored his helmet for a chance to spit.

"I am the pillar! I will support Heaven!" the godflesh monster bellowed as he fell to Kiryu’s level.

"Is that the lie they told you, kid?" Kiryu let out a bitter laugh. "Fuck, they messed you up good."

"I am the pillar! The beacon! The chariot of Heaven’s future!"

The madness in the youth’s voice made Kiryu viscerally sick. Not because he found it disturbing, but because he recognized the same madness as what he’d held when he was at his worst. When he played the broken, arrogant pawn of the wealthy humans whose only thought was to escape the world they’d ruined and assume power over another.

Kiryu took to the air and dodged a tendril of flesh meant to bludgeon him, firing off another antimatter spell that took the tendril off but failed to stop the creature from reabsorbing it and forming another one.

His firing rate with antimatter was one shot for every six seconds, but it was the most effective thing he had that wouldn’t simply destroy everything within a wide radius. He was fine putting the angels out of house and home, but if he used more antimatter than needed, Araqlun would come crashing down on the city beneath it, and he wanted to limit collateral damage since it would be Kir’s reputation on the line.

Sure, he could have simply abandoned the fight, but he got the sense that left unchecked, the abomination might wind up growing out of control.

Thus far, he’d avoided using anything bigger than a hydrogen atom, but he sensed that he needed some fraction of a gram of antimatter to totally annihilate the monstrosity trying to kill him. If he got it wrong...

One gram of antimatter is all it takes to produce an explosion equivalent to the Nagasaki bomb...