The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 439: The Devil

Chapter 439: The Devil

Auric felt... righteous. Strong.

When his uncle, the most powerful angel in Heaven... the most powerful being in the Triune Worlds, asked him to become the source of Heaven’s power- to be more than just another casualty of Maledict’s attack - he knew it was his last shot at becoming someone in Heaven. Someone whose name would be remembered along with his uncle’s.

Because Auric had nothing special. He’d been an angel like any other. A mage like any other. He’d pushed his body and soul to the limit of power and found himself wanting. So wanting, they’d had to replace some of his organs with godflesh, after he’d been brutally crushed by that traitor, Rainier. Wanting... until Uncle Vinam said those magic words...

"Please accept. Become Heaven’s pillar. Our chariot to the future. I will make sure everyone remembers you..."

Auric remembered the shame of standing in front of the cameras before he was taken by the God Core. What happened after was a haze of faces and sensations. Comings and goings. His uncle, alone once.

But through it all, the lost voices had whispered. Their sources in the flesh of his new body, a body that stole and filtered from the unknowable crystal artifact it hid in its depths. A manastone so strange it produced mana instead of merely storing it. A mana so tinged with a rejection of the world it needed his perpetual reach to contain it. To give it something to reject. And from that struggle came power. Power enough for all of Heaven, limited only by the unchanging pace of its rejection.

But Cassiel never visited... the bitch.

And then, the face Auric knew his uncle hated the most. The abomination birthed by Vinam’s twin. The only one of Auric’s aunts who’d meant anything. Who’d meant much more than Auric’s own mother and father, models of absent-mindedness. Uncle Vinam had shared with Auric the terrible truth that Aeleas, Daughter of Heaven, had betrayed them all.

She had loosed from her womb a metatron - a herald of the end. An abomination. The new Devil of Pride.

The metatron.

The moment the nightmare stepped before him, Auric rejected it, with all his being, willing the dream to end so he could return to his all-important role... But at that moment, he felt power. Power that was all his for this moment. This fight...

In rejecting the Devil of Pride, he was becoming one with the mysterious stone. The infinite source of mana.

The thing Uncle’s scientists had called the Metatronic Heart.

*

Fuck. Of course the monster gets bigger.

Kiryu didn’t have time to express his thoughts as the thing attacking him managed to land a surprise tendril strike.

He pivoted in the air a good distance away from his attacker, grateful he’d held onto the antimatter he’d steadily produced - a bundle of antiprotons, antineutrons, and antielectrons he was holding in a stable vacuum containment field as he worked his way up the periodic table. He’d only have one shot at creating third-island stable anti-copernicium. He had one shot at performing a parentless fusion operation that would hopefully release just enough energy to destroy the thing trying to kill him.

An operation that typically required an entire dedicated facility.

With how active the battle was, it was almost all he could do to hold onto his slowly gathering bundle of antimatter. But while he maintained containment, he also tried alternative modes of destruction whenever he was forced to back off.

Fire and slicing the thing apart with jets of water both failed. It ignored the burns and reabsorbed whatever fell off within moments of extending a tendril.

Spreading out a shield over it weakened the shields to the point of being easily breakable - and the damn thing was so malleable it could escape a shield as it was forming.

It was quite the pickle, trying to prevent collateral damage. Or as Kiryu thought of it, trying to leave enough bad guys for Kir to deal with. This was Kir’s world, after all. Creator "god" or not, Kiryu could sense he was just a fading part of what came before it.

It was that sense of his own fading which haunted and drove him from the moment he was put in charge of Kir’s body with the vague instruction of "Focus on saving the world." Then Luda’s message came along, and now he was here, instead of saving the world.

Sure, he’d given the task his all, but the only solution he’d come up with had more to do with survival than stopping the apocalypse. Luda’s message had changed that plan into something that stood a reasonable chance of saving more than a city or two. It had given him a purpose. To find his two other thirds, once it became clear why the angelic clone of Aiko existed. Why the synaptic recorder worn by the cat beastkin went to her... once that same catkin told him he’d met three versions of Aiko.

But if Luda’s plan was to replace a human Aiko with Malzkael, Kiryu would have no part of it. He wouldn’t go along with it. That was part of why he’d decided to abandon those three, aside from feeling uncomfortable with the looks on Anko and Ferro’s faces. And if Luda had become the same monster as himself... Kiryu felt it was his duty to put them down. One monster to another.

The message was the final proof he needed to realize that he wasn’t simply part of Kir’s chosen fight with the powers that be on behalf of their victims and the kid’s worldview. He had been inserted into a fight between two prophets. Two people pushing the world towards a future beyond the apocalypse. On the one side, Kir’s mother. And on the other, Luda.

But what was Luda’s stake in all this?

Kiryu wanted to know. He wanted to know what he’d missed. What he had left to look forward to.

And to do that, he needed to destroy an angel who had been turned into a monster.

As the monster charged with haphazard strikes, Kiryu sped away for some extra distance, firing off a bolt of mana to draw the monster’s attention before returning his focus to gathering more subatomics and flipping them into their antimatter versions. He’d wanted to teleport, but direct contact with antimatter would probably kill him, and wormholes took too long to configure.

Barely seconds later, however, a massive set of shrieks sounded from off to his left.

With the barrier lowered between Araqlun and the growing crystal tower, the latter had finally made contact, and its spreading branches had cradled the massive city. But now, its growth was unfettered, and the core of the crystal began its breakthrough. A shimmering blue spike had pierced the underside of the city, rising like a slow but unstoppable blade as it began to dig higher into the substructure.

The shriek of metal harder than steel breaking over the relentless growth drew Kiryu’s eyes for a moment too long, allowing thin, whip-like tendrils from the monster to close around him, unseen because their white flesh blended with the now-glowing floor.

"Agh!" Kiryu snarled as the tendrils began to crush him through his armor. The vines of flesh contracted as the monster neared, expending copious amounts of mana to fly on wings of godflesh as it bore him towards the pillar.

"You will die," the voice of madness spoke from uncountable mouths, as a head the size of Kiryu’s body drew near. "Uncle will praise me..."

"Look at yourself, Kid. Is this really what you wanted?" Kiryu wanted to teleport away, but he held back, not wanting to lose the precious antimatter. Instead, he put up a shield at his back, trying to pry himself free as he forced his arm forward.

"Silence, Devil!" The monster crashed Kiryu into the piller, shattering the shield. At the same time, Kiryu put as much mana into his arm as possible for a burst of energy, casting the antimatter directly into the monster’s face as he quickly shielded his front.

The explosion pushed Kiryu the final distance into the crystal tower as the monster reeled, a terrible scream escaping as thought fled from the mass of godflesh, before an eerie silence descended as the mass fell away, splattering on the ground and leaking golden blood.

Kiryu tried to catch his breath but immediately felt a sharp pain along his back.

Looks like I snapped a few ribs... But more importantly, he looked at his right arm and saw it now terminated just before the wrist.

"Fuck," he hissed as he landed, producing a quick ball of plasma and gasping through a couple of breaths before he pushed the mangled edge into it. His scream filled the dark spaces as he forced himself to hold until he was sure the wound was cauterized.

Only once the lights stopped flashing in his eyes did he look at the results of the battle. The splatter of unthinking flesh spread out like an amoeba. No longer growing, but much larger than it had been.

It had largely flattened, except for where limbs protruded. He assumed this was because there were probably bones in it. Those limbs slowly shifted and gestured like a silent pantomime. A moaning of body that could not be heard but felt in the sympathetic portions of his mind.

"Time to end this," he muttered. He reached for the panel on his left arm before remembering he lacked the fingers to accurately touch the controls. Using his nose, he tapped the flamethrower button before guiding his arm forward and pushing mana into the spell formation.

A jet of blue flame spat forth, dissolving the godflesh into ash as he kept up the flame, grateful it had lost its resistance with the death of the mind controlling it.

When he finished, however, he saw something unexpected left on the charred black surface. A golden orb, hovering centimeters above the ground. One with a constant outflow of mana that beckoned his interest.

When he tried to pick it up, it moved to stay away from his hand, and so he gently maneuvered to keep the ball between his tail and his hand as he brought it to hover above his palm.

"Now what in the world are you..." Kiryu thought the ball felt like the true soulstones Kir had acquired from Kainur Satanos, but it was different. Worse than those had been because the more he looked at it, the more he felt like it didn’t want to be seen or touched. As if he held the very crystallization of the words Go Away.

"I fully intend to go far, far away." Kiryu looked at the crystal tower and then back at the golden stone. "Suppose it’s worth a shot."

Walking to the tower, wincing with every step, Kiryu tried holding the orb up to the blue surface.

Nothing happened.

"Yeah... didn’t think so-

Suddenly, the blue crystal grew out and over Kiryu’s hand and the orb above it. It crawled over his flesh as he tried to instinctively back off, only to pause as he remembered he was trying to get in.

"Fuck I hope this doesn’t kill us. I really wish you were here, Kid."

There was no response from within or without.

Seconds later, the blue growths finished surrounding Kiryu before pulling him into the crystal, leaving nothing but a glistening blue surface behind.

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