The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 454: Coming Home

Chapter 454: Coming Home

The pure white hallway gave way to a timelessly clean and sterile series of rooms. Kir, sitting on Kiryu’s couch, watched and listened through the man still piloting his body as they were led past room after room of modern conveniences and tech that even Kir didn’t recognize.

They were brought to an open field of grass, where an old angel waited for them, her wings still black as night despite her white hair.

"Is that... Aiko?" Kir received a mental nod from Kiryu as the view grew a little blurry.

The angel was seated in a white plastic chair, dressed in a form-fitting suit like the one Kiryu wore, except sleeker and lacking the hexagons. She faced a door in the middle of the field, and Lawre approached her, planting an affectionate hand on her shoulder before she looked over at Kiryu.

Her face looked so... kind.

"Are you him?" she asked.

"I am Kiryu. The one inside this body’s head is Kir."

She nodded, "So it’s finally time. Do you have my memories?"

Kiryu’s eyes focused on the necklace she wore, an identical match to the one he produced from Kir’s storage a moment later.

"Ah. They said you’d taken it. It was meant to be hers. But I will add what’s left of me to it, and take her memories with me, if you’ll allow it."

Kir watched Kiryu hand her the necklace. One brief moment of twining them together was all it took, and she slid them apart before handing them back before returning hers to her neck. Then, touching it with eight fingers, she spent a moment with her eyes fluttering before returning to normal.

"That poor girl... to have suffered so much. Please return the necklace to her. It will be invaluable in the years to come."

Kir felt genuine concern in Aiko’s voice, so he told Kiryu, "Tell her that I’ll find her if I can."

"Kir says yes," Kiryu said instead.

Nodding, the woman looked to her husband, and Lawre helped her stand. That was when Kiryu’s eyes focused on one of her legs, which was artificial.

Is this place more dangerous than it looks? Kiryu wondered.

"You could just ask them," Kir answered.

"May I ask-"

"A long time ago, Lawre fought his father," Aiko said as she steadied herself and took a step. "Together we drove him off, but not without our own losses."

"He killed the Elder Aiko, and all we managed was to take his hand..." Lawre said bitterly.

Kiryu nodded respectfully. If I know Luda, they would have insisted on regrowing her leg instead of letting her stick around with that kind of injury. She must have kept it for a reason.

Kir did not respond.

"I suppose we shouldn’t waste time then." Aiko said. "Let us go, all of us, together at the end."

She limped towards the door, Lawre at her side. Kir saw what awaited them beyond, wonder rising in his mind right up to the point that Kiryu entered the room.

Stars. Countless stars, galaxies, and nebulae. Each alight and blazing with the promise of potential. One star, however, was so close it formed a black-white shadow against the backdrop of every shadow cast by Aiko and Lawre.

"That’s..."

"The kugelblitz," Kiryu finished for him. "A clarion, from which universes are emitted."

Directly beneath the kugelblitz, which grew further away the closer they approached, sat a human on a circular couch, except for a wedge missing in the middle. Their face seemed to phase into a smile as they looked up.

"At long last..." they smiled, but their voice sounded so... tired. "I am Luda, who is also called Aidaeb. Why don’t you five take a seat, and we can get started." He was in the middle of gesturing when Kir saw Lawre turn.

"Five?" Lawre looked behind them at the distant white rectangle that was the door.

By the time he looked back, Kir found himself in control of his own body, while to his right, Kiryu stood in the body of a bearded Japanese man, his gaze intense and his hair tied back at the crown of his head. To Kiryu’s right stood an elf-like woman with gentle crystal antlers and wings made of ribbons of light.

She looked down at her arms, and Kir realized that he was looking at Amida. Not as she’d appeared to him but as she had been.

A whimper spilled from her lips as she hugged herself. "No... no, I don’t want to be. I can’t go through with living again. I can’t..."

"Calm yourself, Cleo. I will return you to your prior state if you wish, after this. But for us to talk... is something I have wished for a long, long time."

As if realizing there was nothing else for her to do, Amida sat, but defiantly she replied, "It’s Amida. That’s me. If I was... Cleo... she’s dead. I need her to be dead."

"I will do my best." Luda nodded, gesturing for everyone to sit.

Lawre and Aiko sat to either side of Luda, pouring tea when a table manifested before them, while Kir and Kiryu wound up sitting across from Amida.

More tables manifested in front of them. A glistening wedge of tiramisu appeared before Kiryu, while a bowl of iced cream and berries appeared before Kir. In front of Namida a strange and ephemeral confection that looked half like mist and strawberries, the latter of which were hovering, appeared. All of them were accompanied by golden utensils, on plates of different kinds of fine china.

Lawre and Aiko, after the tea was poured, took up their own plates of multiflavored jellies, from which they conducted a small trade with Luda between them. Lawre took Aiko’s matcha jellies, while she took his orange peel ones.

The intent of this was clear to Kir and Kiryu, who quietly took up their teas and dug into their food. Amida took her tea but glared at the confection before her like it was going to bite her. Seeing this, Luda waved a hand and the confection disappeared, replaced by the same iced cream bowl Kir had. Only then did she reluctantly reach for and try it, her eyes lighting up with genuine delight for a tiny moment.

As the moment continued, Kir eventually finished his iced cream and reached into his storage, passing a full pipe to Kiryu, who accepted it, raising a finger and producing a weak flame to light it.

So much for hating magic, Kir thought to himself, smirking at Kiryu.

Silently, they reached a point where each finished their food to satisfaction. As soon as the last plate was laid onto the tables, Luda dismissed everything but the tea and tables with a light clap.

"I bet you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here-"

"Fucking stars, get to the point, Luda!" Kiryu cut in. "This isn’t an elevator for fuck’s sake."

Lawre and Amida stared at Kiryu in shock. Aiko chuckled, and Kir just shook his head.

Luda returned a smirk, then turned to Kir. "First off, let me say thank you, for bringing Kiryu back to us. For being his vessel for all your life, and for helping him come to a place where he could live again." Luda bowed their head, "Thank you, Kid."

"See where I got it from?" Kiryu muttered towards Kir.

"How did you know all that about Kiryu? Whenever we talked, I thought you were insane."

"I’m only insane when I look into the future. Trying to do that while talking to someone is like radioing someone underwater and having to wait for a bubble of air to come between you and the mic. Your mother could do it, but that’s just how I made her."

"You made her?" Kir felt something tense within him rise.

"Her bloodline, yes. Do you know what the bane of seeing the future and being powerful enough to shape it is?"

"Not getting the results you want?" Kiryu guessed.

"It’s boredom," Luda said, their face phasing through dozens of examples of the word. "So I made prophets. A bloodline that can look backward and forwards. That could mix things up in ways I couldn’t predict. It worked, for a long, long time. Until the last hundred or so generations. When the oracles became hellbent on expanding Heaven’s control through indirect means. They brought back the Aiko clones. They expanded the genocides of the Heavenswars. They became everything I feared the angels would become. Malicious. Entitled. Boring."

Kir clenched his fists. This person had the gall to claim that they were omnipotent while they let the world burn? What kind of sick-

"I’m not omnipotent. Not outside of the Duat. One step out there, and I’m only so much dust in the wind." They fluttered their hand. "But now that we’re back together, I want to try something new."

Kir’s mind raced with thoughts. If Luda was confined to the so-called Mother Dungeon, it made sense that he’d been able to contact Kir while he’d been in a dungeon. But there were times outside..."

"Don’t think too hard about it," Luda’s voice bloomed in Kir’s mind, confirming that the being was reading his thoughts. "Dying puts you closer to me because, well, my real body is the gate to this universe."

"Dying?" Kiryu guessed.

"Not exactly, my love," Luda said. "I see the Kid hasn’t told you everything if you don’t know."

Kiryu looked at Kir, who now had enough context to guess at what Luda meant. "Sometime before I broke through to you, Amida appeared. She told me what would happen if I passed through the gate of mana inside me."

"Discorporation from your physical body, yes. You’d be a wandering soul, your body reduced to a state of ignorance. But that is exactly what you have to do to finish evolving."

"What do you mean?" Kir asked.

"I mean what I said. As a metatron, your body has been slowly purifying itself of your reliance on flesh since you were born. When you began to reify yourself, you started a stage of evolution that has progressed faster and faster. But the last thing holding you back will be your mind. So you need to step out for a few. Give your body time to become the most Kir it’s ever been. Do that, and you can survive almost anything. Remaking your body will be about as hard as finding a tree for the materials."

"But if I step out, won’t I be stuck there?" Kir asked, looking at Amida.

Luda looked at her and sighed. "I understand why you didn’t tell him. You didn’t want him to gain the power to change your body."

"I didn’t want him to leave me," Amida replied. "He could die. Like some of the others..."

Luda nodded. "It’s strange, I know, finding friendship after so long," Luda looked to Lawre, who was sipping his tea with a pinky raised, prompting a small chuckle from Kir.

"Can we get back on track?" Aiko asked with a stern tone.

"Right. Yes. My plan isn’t to die, per se."

Luda pointed upwards, at the ball of black that emitted light, before finishing.

"It’s to go home."

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