The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 86: Out Of The Abyss

Chapter 86: Out Of The Abyss

Stella used Kir’s body in ways so creative, that he hoped he’d remember them later for Kordia and Rain.

Not once during the process did the Forbidding placed on him activate, even when she caused him some painful pleasure. Afterward, they speculated that it was because she was his familiar and he didn’t recognize the pain as an attack.

After picking himself up off the floor, Kir noticed a small object stuck to his arm. He plucked it off to see that it was one of the seals from his ear. Stella confirmed that it had left a circular gauge, but very careful poking on her part proved that it could now be safely removed.

Inspecting both pieces, Kir accidentally applied too much pressure to the former seal, causing it to shear into dozens of tiny circular sheets. Each one of them was etched with magic circles, meaning that whoever had designed the seals had layered them with spells that even Chancellor Lumin hadn’t seen... or perhaps hadn’t shown Kir.

He hoped he had all the pieces as he dimensionally stored the tiny shards. Checking the ground for them was impossible with the light washing out the stony terrain. Trying to look at the source of the light almost made him panic as he beheld a black orb surrounded by white orbits, distorted as if through a many-layered lens.

"That’s... a singularity," Kir uttered, forgetting both Stella and the pain in his body for a moment.

"You actually know what that thing is?" she asked, a happy tilt to her voice reflecting the glow of post-coital satisfaction. Letting her lead had been the right idea.

"It’s mass... so much mass that even light can’t escape," Kir said. He couldn’t even see anything that looked remotely like matter feeding it. Was it a black hole, or some phenomenon that looked like one? From his past life, a word surfaced in his mind... Kugelblitz. A singularity of light.

"Uh, are you kidding? It’s a big black thing, right there." Stella pointed out as she pulled her hair into a ponytail.

"We’re not actually seeing it, just the light around it..." Kir could feel his mind straining to assess just how massive the black hole had to be. Sizes were impossible to gauge in here, so they had to be extremely distant, but by all appearances, it was at least a few kilometers away. After a long moment of gawking, the only thing he could come up with was, "We should be dead..."

"Yeah, well, we’re not," Stella said, stretching as she popped her back and tail. "Fuck I thought I’d evolve from that... I feel like an overstuffed pillow." She looked up. "You want me to ride you up the hole or are we flying separate?"

"You’ve ridden me up the holes plenty," Kir snarked back, making Stella cackle. When she was done, he said, "I think we should stay together. Flight included... But first I want to test something. It might hurt."

"Worse than when you were pulling my tail and spanking me while I-"

"I’m going to try casting," Kir said.

Stella groaned.

After pulling on his pants, he stuffed his gambeson and uniform shirt - which had repaired itself thanks to its enchantments - into his dimensional storage. The pain from his seals didn’t seem to have decreased despite the slight mana emission, but he needed to know for sure.

Aiming a hand toward the black hole, he tried the lowest-power spell he could think of: making a puff of wind.

The unfortunately familiar shock filled him as soon as the spell was released. Added to the hot-knife pain of his advancing mana poisoning, it was difficult to say if the level was different, but Kir suspected it had lessened because by the end of it, he was only on his knees instead of completely on the ground.

"Ugh, we can’t catch a break..." Stella said after they both recovered from the shared pain.

"It was worth a try," he sighed. "How are you holding up?" Kir asked.

"Still full. Breathing still feels wrong, but it’s bearable," Stella reported.

They both looked up at the hole. It was irregular, and a bit squared in some places because of how the rock was sheared. Looking around, there was no indication of other exits.

As if in unspoken agreement, Stella’s wings flared out as Kir let his wings out. The first thing he noticed on stretching them was tenderness and pain. Whatever had healed him hadn’t done a complete job, but he wasn’t about to complain.

Taking off, he confirmed that he was still capable of flight as Stella latched onto his back.

Up and up they flew, with Kir occasionally having to grab onto cracks in the rock to rest before pushing off again. The hole above them was completely dark, except for the odd glimmer. Looking down, the place they’d come from looked like a ragged grey dot.

Whenever Kir rested, the two of them would speculate a bit about where they were. Kir didn’t know which was a worse prospect: That they were flying somewhere worse, or that they were flying nowhere. They didn’t even know if they were still in the same dungeon.

Just when Kir was beginning to suspect there might not be a top to the hole they were flying in, he saw something.

Something large and round, set into the wall. As he landed in it, he saw it for what it was.

"This is a sewage pipe." Kir declared.

"Sewage?!" Stella raised her voice, not getting off his back as she looked down.

"There’s just dust," Kir said. "Looks like it hasn’t worked in ages."

Stella hopped down, "Well good, because I refuse to add getting dipped in shit to this shit situation." She rubbed her arms, as if they were a bit sore from holding on. "I’m not that kinky."

Kir stored his wings. He felt lucky they’d made it this far because his insides were really hurting from all the mana filling him. He really hoped the mystery voice was right and that he it was "just part of the process" for him, because he didn’t want to leave Stella stranded here. Or explode.

"What do you think? Should we walk or keep flying?" Kir asked. "Sewers mean cities... we can’t be too far underground."

"You haven’t met mountain elves. All they talk about is how deep they can go," Stella shot back.

"Don’t you mean dwarves?" Kir asked.

"That’s just a stereotype." Stella popped her back. "Dwarves mostly carve into the surface of mountains. Believe me, when I worked at the shop, there was this pair of adventurers that would go at each other about who had the better hole in the rock. Wonder where they wound up..."

Kir looked out of the large pipe they were in. Now that he looked closely, he could see smaller holes in the wall on the other side of the hole. One of them, further up, seemed to be the mate to the one they were in. He saw only holes in the rock and what seemed to be unreinforced concrete with no indications of piping.

"Still doesn’t answer my question," Kir said.

"Hm? I guess we can stretch our legs for a bit. We can always come back," Stella answered.

As they walked, they discussed their options a bit. Fighting monsters unless they were sure to win was a bad idea, and so far what Kir could tell about dungeons seemed to indicate they were starting from the end of this one, so searching out the exit likely meant going up and taking their time, since dungeons could have multiple ways in and out.

"Our best bet is to just fly and watch out for the room edges... speed running an escape, basically."

"Speed running? Isn’t all running at speed?" Stella quipped.

"It’s a figure of speech. Like... doing things as fast as possible, even if you have to cheat," Kir explained.

"Where do you come up with this stuff?" Stella asked.

"Uh... I guess I just grew up weird," Kir said.

"Well you’re not lying, but you’re getting all weird again. You always get weird when someone questions your weird sayings," she noted. It was the first time she was calling him out, but Kir somehow felt she’d been observing him on this point for a long time.

"Maybe I don’t like having to explain myself," Kir tried.

"Pfft. That’s not true at all, boss. You love explaining shit all the time. Like that time you let Kordia use lightning on your-

"Anyway!" Kir interrupted. "I think there was a ladder here."

They’d come to a portion of the tunnel that had a cylinder going upward and relatively even parallel pairs of holes.

Kir started to climb, and Stella converted to her bat form to hang onto him.

If he had to guess, it was about ten meters to the top, where he found a rough, solid barrier in the way. One firm push, however, was all it took to break apart the thin, rusty cover.

He poked his head past it to look around, and what he saw made him gasp.

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