The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 461: First Impact

Chapter 461: First Impact

Time melted before Amarena, until even stopping became just a minor interruption to the trial she endured. She had no idea of how many places she’d gone. The fields of Perdition were empty of portals. Tzal was now a smouldering bed of lava, with only a few familiar outposts to indicate there had ever been a city there at all.

She’d crossed the breadth of Hell several times over, and yet could not conceive that her task would ever finish. Not until he’d visited every last corner of Hell, as only grandiose liars would claim.

If not for her companions, Amarena knew she would have gone insane long ago.

The others had found survivors. Angels who had been outposted under the assumption of their victory. Demons who had hidden deep within their mountains. One group of demons had even lived beneath the same mountain as a Heavenly outpost.

It spoke volumes about how desperate they were that they now begrudgingly cooperated to survive against monsters. The angels with their bright wings dulled and heavy with ash. The demons with their hungry eyes. The ability of Hell to sustain life was dying out from under them, and yet, even then, their ancient conflicts could not be set aside.

That is what Amarena found when she returned to the three Aytherians, who had set up camp in the ruins of the Grand Palace of Naraka.

"Give it here, you little thief!" an angel snarled.

"You stole it from us first!" an imp shouted back.

"Lies, that’s all your kind ever speak!" the angel spat.

The moment Amarena appeared with a thunderous crack! on the other side of the once magnificent hall, those who were not in the fight stood, gathering into a half-moon arc as they organized themselves.

"What’s this?" Amarena asked, letting Orby float next to her as she released it. She felt concerned. The depth of mana she’d once felt in the construct had stopped feeling full, which meant its production had slowed. She’d laid tens of thousands of beacons, and the idea of failing at the end made her all too short-tempered as the mutual assailants brought their argument to her.

"Enough!" Amarena shouted, "Share the bread or I will kill the next person that speaks and be done with it!"

With that, she turned, regarding the construct. "Orby. Make bread and water for forty people. Thrice over."

The construct began to obey as she pushed it towards the crowd. And two by two they lined up to take their shares. The process had gotten painfully slow, and Amarena felt a guilty spike in her heart at remembering that she had yet to tell anyone but Keiya, Lugh, and Ann about her fears. Especially when she remembered what she’d seen when she arrived near where they’d started their journey.

The portal home had closed.

In the middle of her rest, Ann finally brought the question of what to do to a head.

"Rena... I know this might be a bad time, but I think we need to tell them."

"Tell them what?" Amarena asked. "That we don’t have a way home, and this is a suicide mission? That my stopping just one more shard of Heaven might mean starving them to death?"

"I think they deserve to know," Lugh said. "That their sacrifices aren’t in vain. That we tried our best, but we can’t guarantee they’ll survive."

Keiya remained silent, sitting with her arms around her knees as she looked at Nimfi, who was suffering after getting hurt in the latest monster attack. The naiad’s mana was tied to Keiya, and so her spellcasting had suffered as a result.

The attacks had come more often, but each monster slain added mana to the air and released some of the refugees. It was impossible to predict when a monster would strike, but while they’d thought getting into the city would ease their troubles. Instead, it multiplied them as each building had the potential to be a nest for monsters in their chrysalis forms.

"I say we hold out for one more thing," Amarena said. "If something else happens while I’m out next time, then I’ll tell them."

"That’s what you said last time!" Ann protested.

"I don’t remember saying that," Amarena said. She was too tired to-

A rumbling began. Something deep and omnipresent, as if Hell itself had risen to defy her attempt to delay the truth.

"What was that?" someone said from the main hall. "A Hellquake, now?!" someone else exclaimed.

Then a shriek went up. Not a person’s shriek, but the sounds of monsters.

Lugh was the first on his feet, shouting, "Everyone get to the basement!"

"No!" Amarena shouted. "We need to get to get outside or we might be buried!"

No one was about to argue with their only source of sustenance, and so Amarena led the way to through the front hall... until the monsters began to burst through the doors.

Demons and angels alike fled to the side as the monsters ran, but rather than attack, they simply fled, breaking through walls and doors as they tried to run away from the source of the disturbance, destroying the back half of the castle as they did so.

A few were even trampled by their fellows, but no monster stayed long enough to feed on the free mana.

"It stopped," Keiya stated the obvious once the dust had settled and the last of the living monsters fled.

Slowly, they filed out of the building, but as they entered the quiet, open space of the courtyard with its twisted, black trees devoid of foliage, Rena realized that something was off.

A minute ticked by. Then two. Then three...

This didn’t feel like a normal Hellquake. There should have been aftershocks. There should have been-

"Something’s coming!" An angel shouted, having taken to the air. He pointed off to the northwest, and there Amarena beheld a massive cloud of ash approaching.

"Back in the castle!" Amarena shouted.

Almost as one, the crowd turned. They ran for their lives as the cloud began to swallow the city, managing to make it into a cellar while Amarena stayed at the door to watch the incoming tempest until the last possible moment, when she accelerated into the cellar and closed the door.

Ann had a light up, and Keiya soon joined her.

"What’s going on?" one of the Angels asked.

"I don’t know," Amarena answered as the stones of the castle collapsed and fell above them. "That was like no Hellquake I’ve ever experienced."

"R-Rena..." Ann’s voice drew Amarena’s attention to a corner of the massive cellar. A beast lay against a corner of the room, a young ashwolf, taking in panicked breaths as it held itself against the wall, scared out of its mind and clearly waiting for the disaster to blow over.

"Just leave it," Amarena said. "If it becomes a problem, I’ll deal with it."

A whine rose from the ashwolf, and seconds later a new rumble started, weaker than the first. With the cellar holding firm, Amarena called a rest, setting up a camp without fire and even tossing some bread to the ashwolf, who sniffed it warily before relaxing enough to take a bite.

Keiya fed her mana-rich bread to Nimfi in small pieces as Amarena reclined next to her, everyone quickly growing desensitized to the strange Hellquakes as the destructive clouds passed overhead with howling dust and cracked stones.

Then came an hour without any further quakes.

Amarena listened to the silence as Keiya started to rock side to side with Nimfi in her arms.

"Is she alright?" Amarena asked.

"I think she’s getting better," Keiya said with a small smile. "She just needs some sleep," she rubbed Nimfi on the bridge of the spirit’s nose gently. As Keiya started to hum, Amarena found herself drifting also into darkness...

Daughter...

Amarena awoke in a field of ash. Pushing herself to a stand, she saw something she never thought she’d see on Hell.

Trees. Not the shriveled, barbed things she knew, but an entire forest of green trees. Aytherian trees. And she towered over it.

In the dream, she reached into the forest, parting the trees like the spines of an ashwolf. Looking for something. Something that was hers...

Our fight isn’t over. Amarena turned, and suddenly she was beneath her mother’s shadow. Leviathan, in all her power, bigger than a dragon and thrice as fierce. Her demonic features were subsumed by a body meant to wield its size for destruction.

More than a warform. She was the essence of Wrath, given form.

And there was no way Amarena could fight her.

Because there was no point.

"You’re dead," Amarena said. "The Wrathlands are gone. What more is there for me to fight for now?"

A pain sparked in Amarena’s forehead.

"Where is my daughter? Does your Justice not call you to act?"

Suddenly, Amarena was standing amidst the trees, and Attika, her mother, Leviathan, paced around her in a circle.

"I have acted. I have saved what I can. And I am tired."

"Fool!" Leviathan snapped. "This is Hell! And Hell calls to its own. I am home, and yet you have not come to claim my power?"

"What power? I have the piece of heartstone you meant for me!"

"When you fought the usurper. But I did not raise you to settle for a piece of power."

"Speak plainly, mother."

"You forget my words, and so you have forgotten me." Attika pointed, and suddenly they were beneath a dark, starry sky. As the wisps of Hell’s ashclouds tried to fill the space, the shards of Heaven fell, each bearing a world tree. Only, they didn’t just fall.

Where the beacons lay, a sudden pulse of magic would stop the trees in the air, before they fell the final measures. They did not break. They did not collapse.

"Search for me amidst the roots," her mother laughed. "These trees are of Hell now, and thus they are yours. Find my heart, and you will know the true nature of what it is to be Leviathan."

Amarena woke in a cold sweat.

"Are you alright?" Keiya asked.

"Yes," Amarena took stock of the room. The angels and demons in their separate corners. "I think I know where everyone will be safe."