The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 95: Speed Run, Farming

Chapter 95: Speed Run, Farming

"You forgot to square the root," Kir said as he looked over Stella’s shoulder. "After that, you can simplify the equation better."

"It just ends up as the same number! Why do I have to put it all under the same thing?" Stella whined as she slashed a correction into the sand. They were, counter to Kir’s expectations, safely standing on a beach, with only the waves to watch out for as they took a few hours to rest.

"This kind of math is more complicated, but it’s what you need before you can calculate physics," Kir said as he looked over the claw he’d pulled off a crab-like grotesque.

Concluding it was probably not safe to try eating, especially because inside it looked like it was just cartilage and blue ichor, he tossed it onto the pile of grotesque corpses he’d gathered after spending the last few hours fighting.

Stella had helped, even her very basic fire magic was more powerful in the dungeon, which is what had inspired Kir to consider cooking.

But nothing here was appetizing.

As near as he could tell without a consistent marker, they’d experienced about ten days’ worth of time since their first grotesque encounter, and that was with largely flying over and avoiding encounters with the denizens of the dungeon.

The biggest reason Kir had chosen for them to stop at the beach was that it was relatively calm and small. Having learned how to tell when they were getting near dungeon walls, Kir guessed this floor was only about a kilometer around. The portal out was obvious since it was a crack of red sky horizontal to the beach, almost directly opposite the dark portal leading back down.

At the edges of the water, the waves seemed oddly "sliced" at times. As if the water within the floor was separated by a wavy layer of glass. It was more obvious with the water going out, as incoming water would lap over it. The beach itself was white-sanded, its inner portion covered with bleached wood and dark chunks of volcanic stone. Nothing here had lived, at least nothing visible, except for the crab things that Kir had smashed by their dozens.

His war form had made short work of them, and the fact they were cannibalistic opportunists had only helped the fight, as those on the edges of the fight had started eating their dead over engaging him.

Unlike the last few floors, there were no corpses or artifacts from people. Whether that was because they’d been thoroughly eaten or had simply passed through quickly, Kir could only guess. He wasn’t about to go dissecting more crabs to find out.

Spotting a particularly intact abdomen that didn’t look like it had any facial features in its chitin, he stowed it dimensionally as a sample.

After another couple of hours of correcting Stella’s algebra and posing new problems, they settled down to just sit for a bit. Just as Kir was starting to drowse, Stella shot up and climbed onto his shoulder.

"I think I just noticed something," she said.

"Hm?"

"That piece of driftwood has been going back and forth across the room edge for the last ten minutes," she pointed, and Kir saw a small strip of white on the blue-grey water. "Just watch."

It took a couple of minutes, but eventually Kir saw as the wood passed into the wall, only to seemingly come back in over itself - or perhaps through itself - as it extruded back in.

"What do you think it means?" Kir asked.

"Dunno. The only reason everything’s stirred up right now is because of the fight. It’s interesting though." The waters had been pretty calm before they arrived. The grotesques had surged out of the water as soon as Kir stepped onto the beach.

Stella’s tone was thoughtful. The last ten days of surviving, and enduring lecture after lecture from Kir, had made her more observant and less... distracting in her choice of subject matter.

Except when she was at risk of mana poisoning, which had come up only twice over the last ten days, or he said something that she could twist with innuendo. Long division had been unusually erotic for her, and they weren’t even at calculus yet.

The mana on this floor was less intrusive, and the heat inside Kir had settled down to more of a warmth. He was still stuck in his war form, but he’d grown more comfortable with it.

With no particular thought in his head, Kir reached backward with a massive claw and pulled up one of the dead grotesque’s legs. It was spiral-formed in parts and looked like it was forming fingers or mandible mouths out of its chitin, but Kir saw it for only a moment before he hurled it at the barrier over the piece of driftwood.

It disappeared, twisting in the air for a moment before simply not being there.

"Huh," Kir sounded.

"Let’s try something," Stella said, picking up a piece of volcanic rock and handing it to Kir. He hurled it into the same area, and it came back in. "Well that’s disturbing," Stella said.

"What is?" Kir asked.

"Dead things come back... but when we fell through..."

"We went somewhere else with everything on us," Kir finished. His eyes widened. Suddenly he didn’t want his sample of crab abomination anymore. He pulled it out of dimensional storage and hurled it into the barrier, where it disappeared... Meaning it was still alive.

"Stella... remember what I taught you about making real fire with magic?" Kir asked once he pulled his tail away from the pile of corpses. "We’re going to need a lot of it."

Hour later, after piling up as much wood on top of the corpses as he could, Kir stood by as Stella set fire to the pile. The smell made him even more glad he hadn’t tried to experiment with eating the monsters. But burning the bodies netted them one more discovery: mana crystals, in fine filaments, glittered amidst the remains, having sintered from the heat into the bottoms of some of the carapaces.

"This stuff isn’t bad," Stella said as she plucked a greenish-blue tangle of the material out of one shell. "Mid-grade."

Kir looked at her quizzically for a moment before remembering she’d worked at a magic shop for decades. When he reached out a hand, she placed it on one of his massive fingers, which sparked a familiar urge in Kir.

The mana crystal was on his tongue before he entirely registered that he was eating it, and it tasted a bit like fruit-flavored candy floss.

"Well, there went a couple of silvers," Stella teased. "Did you really have to eat it? Don’t you have that big debt now?"

"Guess it just means I’m more of a manavore than you," Kir shrugged. In truth, the fact Kir didn’t feel particularly, physically hungry was messing with his head a little. As weird as it was, the act of eating made him feel human, even though he was far from being human in this life.

"Some of us have standards about what we eat," Stella jabbed back. "But just so you know, mana crystals are hard as a good dick to get into thread form. Enough to fit in one of your hands would probably buy you a house. Just saying."

"Well then, I guess we’d better get to work gathering it," Kir said.

"We?" Stella raised an eyebrow.

Kir raised his massive, clawed hands. "I’m not exactly capable of fine plucking right now."

With Kir cracking the burnt shells and Stella handling most of the gathering, eventually they came up with half a handful of the filaments. Once they were done, Kir thought to repeat the experiment of throwing a burned-out shell at the barrier, and this time the shell passed through and re-entered just above itself.

"Kill it with fire," Kir muttered.

"Huh?" Stella said, leaning against his leg.

"Just thinking."

Far behind, in another door, a tendril appeared.

At the tip of it was the skull of an avian creature, and it dug this skull into the rich soil of the swampy biome like a claw, before hauling its mass through the gap between stratums.

Sensing the disturbance, from deeper in the swamp came a grotesque; this one a lizard-like being, with arms growing from one eye socket, each ending with a mouth or eye as it contemplated the prey before it.

The arrived tendril held still, tiny mouths in the flesh opening and closing. Whispering and burbling and screeching. The lizard-like being lunged at the still mass, biting, only to suddenly find itself constricted, embraced, bitten, and shredded; consumed alive.

Its cries drew more grotesques. More predators... but before the creature that had fed for untold millennia beneath them, that had dissolved all pretense of thought and form but that which consumed, they were the prey.

It gorged itself for days, consuming the dungeon floor down to the lowliest of scum in the briny pools.

It made itself anew from the flesh of those things that would have made it into their flesh. Their disparate, unity-fearing flesh.

It made itself. Not to sit and wait, but to crawl.

To seek the next gap.

The next crack in reality through which its richest, most luscious prey had fled.

The one that severed it. The one that it had almost reached, crawling through the towering stones, before the creature and its lesser companion flew away. Dared to stand in the dust of its once-body before departing through the hole that fed.

Yet it could still taste the mana that creature shed, as it filled itself with power at every breath... the power and promise of that creature, the concentration of so much... being.

The one that burned away its once great bulk in a light it could not comprehend.

It did not fear. It hungered. It knew the lightbearer could bleed. It hungered for it.

The maddening hunger of a predator that had tasted the chance, after eons, to become full.

It would pursue. There was nothing left below to consume.

And so, this predator, who had discovered vengeful gluttony, shifted upon itself, making its flesh into a larger imitation of its prey.

The four-winged form it had watched escape.

But even with its own wings, it could not fly.

And so, it crawled.