The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 96: Speed Run, Safe Strat

Chapter 96: Speed Run, Safe Strat

As Kir had come to spend subjective weeks down here, the dungeon had started to make a weird sort of sense to him. For one thing, even if the features of the dungeon weren’t consistent, there were tendencies. Like the tendency of the portals between floors to become either larger or more numerous the "higher" up they went.

Some doors led to dead-end floors; places with no discoverable way in or out. It was exploring and backtracking out of these floors that had taken most of their time, so even though they’d been through more than a dozen floors, largely by air, there was no way to tell how far they were from the exit.

The only way Kir could guess they were advancing toward the surface was that the floors were steadily growing more and more alive.

They hadn’t seen any indications of civilization since the bottom floor, but they had encountered a few signs of dead people, mostly bits of equipment or bodies. The preserved journal that Stella had found had turned out to be indecipherable.

The one thing Kir could tell for sure was that it was dated up to a certain point, with each corner bearing consistent markers, and the writer of it had taken great pains to write extensive notes, with sketches. It was full from front to back.

Little of what was recorded in its later sketches matched anything he’d seen down here, so he wondered if some of the floors had changed or if he was looking at information from elsewhere. But if he had to guess, the writer had been something of an adventurer. The more he stared into the unreadable words, the more he felt committed to making sure the journal would make it out intact.

If he could only make sure he and Stella made it out alive.

"First floor where we aren’t seeing grotesques and somehow I feel like I’m going to miss fighting them," Kir said as he peered over the ridge of the rocky, dried-up river beds.

Ambushing prey at the entrances was a favored tactic of those creatures that had been trapped in their biomes for generations. Here, a conflagration of perhaps two dozen dragons laid curled around the way out.

Each was bigger than him, even in his war form. Their upper scales were brown, but with blue tinges to the edges, and while none of them breathed fire, their razor-sharp teeth and the yellow-red tinge to their saliva suggested they had other painful ways to kill.

An apex predator like a dragon, shouldn’t have been there. Not unless dragons weren’t the apex predator of this floor. Or not unless something else was going on that he didn’t understand.

Enhancing his body wouldn’t let him overcome physics entirely, especially in the air. They’d barely managed to escape getting flown down on their way in, and these dragons were fast. He’d thought about running through but given the dragons’ behavior... It could have been something worse on the other side.

"I say we wait for them to kill each other," Stella said. "Or we can try flying again. Maybe lure one off so you can stop complaining about food."

Kir’s stomach rumbled. His body might not have needed food, but his mind still expected it. And in front of them were a whole lot of real animals, not... whatever abominations the grotesques were. He’d take a few nibbles of "mana floss" but it wasn’t the same after the fourth or fifth time and he did want it as a guaranteed source of gold.

"While I’ve been craving steak for days, Stella, if we want that we’ll be waiting a long time. The safe strategy is to wait and just fly past. Look how they’re not going all out. We know they cooperated to try to hunt us down." Kir’s eyes fell on a smaller dragon who was nursing its wounds. "What I don’t get is why they’re digging in."

Each dragon that wasn’t prowling around and picking fights was, rather slowly, using its lower body to expand the many oval divots in the ground that surrounded the gate. Kir hadn’t known what to make of them, but occasionally a resting dragon would expand its divot too far and get a growled warning, or a head-butt and a roaring match. From what he could tell, the only things in the divots were bones, so egg-laying was out.

And almost all of them were keeping a constant lookout, one eye on the portal and the other in the opposite direction, which given how the divots fanned out from the gate, had every direction covered.

Above the pitch-black portal that jutted diagonally over the dragons was a striated, orange-brown rock shelf splattered with droppings. On top of that were dozens of species of smaller scavengers Kir couldn’t recognize. Most of them were lizard-like but with colorful, feathered wings and every kind of bird-like call.

Kir couldn’t help but feel it would be nice to bring back one of the rainbow-feathered ones for his moms. Darlae loved raptors.

For a few more minutes he watched as one of the rainbow raptors landed on a particularly calm-looking dragon, running its spade-like lower teeth under the dragon’s scales and side to side, before withdrawing and licking up the parasites that came out with a sticky tongue.

The dragon made a series of happy sounds.

Kir smiled.

Suddenly, a rumbling sound came from the door.

The dragons that were fighting stopped, and some that were resting in their divots got up, stamping their clawed feet in anticipation.

The rumbling grew, and Kir spotted movement coming from the portal. Something dark slipped out, flopping wetly onto the ground, and then another, and another.

Suddenly all the dragons were standing as countless, eyeless eel-like creatures, black and mucus-covered, flowed out of the portal in a mass. There were so many, they overfilled the divots and flopped past the waiting dragons, who gorged themselves as fast as possible. The eels cried out regardless of whether they were being eaten or not, a nasty, high-pitched sound between burbling, suffocated breaths, revealing thin, white baleen covered in red algae.

The dragons that had been on the periphery, most of whom were smaller, quickly moved to snap up the eels as the scavengers swarmed above.

"How’d they know that was coming?" Kir wondered as he saw the ground grow covered by purplish blood and mostly-white entrails. Even to his empty stomach, the colors were not appetizing.

"Who cares? Let’s just get out of here so we can fuck in a bed for once," Stella smacked him in the head with her tail. "Remember you owe me a body ride."

"I’m glad your standards have improved," Kir shot back, before pushing his bulk to standing.

Some time ago, Stella had proposed Kir let her possess him again. It turned out that when that happened the first time, during his duel with an anti-magic user, he could have piloted Stella’s body if she’d let him. He only learned that because she wanted to "experiment" with his war form.

While he’d tried letting her get it over with, it turned out they couldn’t do so in such a mana-rich environment. Kir recalled vaguely talking to Kordia and Rain about demonic and angelic possession and the typical countermeasure was disrupting the possessed’s mana. Kir was still far from stable, even if Stella didn’t need to drain him as often - or milk him, as she preferred to say.

Kir took flight, more comfortable with it on this floor now that his wings weren’t "overcharging" him. Many dragons looked up but were focused more on their feast as he slipped into the top of the portal, above the level of the entering eels.

Flying into the black, Kir was immediately hit with a shock as he found himself emerging into a cold, chaotic, watery environment. The immediate edge of the portal dumped him out of the air into a deep, dark pool that reeked of sulfur. He pulsed his wings, trying to get away as he felt eels bashing against him, hoping he was going up.

When he burst through the surface, took a ragged breath. Wiping the briny water from his eyes, he saw he was in a cave, and the eel-filled waters were churning as something larger and paler slipped amongst them, backlit by the washed-out brown-yellow of the portal which glowed dully at the sandy edge of a small lake.

Suddenly Kir remembered, "Stella? Stella?!" he called out. The cave was barely lit by a red glow from the moss-covered, round crystals on the ceiling, and it was impossible to see well even a few meters away.

From out of the water, Stella’s arm burst up, and Kir reached out and past it, pulling Stella out of the water.

She wasn’t alone.

"Get this little fucker off me!" she shouted as soon as Kir had her.

Clinging to her, partially tangled in her hair and wings, and absolutely terrified, was one of the scavenger raptors from the previous floor. Kir pulled them apart, grunting with pain as the raptor bit his hand and held on.

Stella scrambled away and shook herself, before quickly shapeshifting into a tiny dragon so the water and eel mucus would fall off of her. She shrieked at the raptor in Kir’s hand before returning to normal.

"That was the worst door ever," she said.

Suddenly the white creature in the water burst up and toward them, with a clicking shriek of fury. Kir barely caught sight of a spiniform creature that resembled an eyeless cross between a crab, a manatee, and a slug before he grabbed Stella and ran.

After three steps, he came to a wall, and had to turn to find the deeper darkness before running that way as the creature left the water, revealing a long, sinuous body that was bulbous toward its mouth, its twenty crab-like legs skittering under a mucus-drenched skirt of flesh as it pursued.

As Kir fled, the cave began to narrow from above, and he stowed his wings as soon as he felt one of them impact a stalactite, ignoring the pain as he focused on going forward.

"How the fuck can it see us?" Stella asked as she watched behind them, remaining in Kir’s hand as the creature broke through a stalagmite mere meters away.

"Echolocation!" Kir shouted, before grunting heavily as a stalactite broke against his horns.

"That’s not a bat!" Stella argued, raising her arms as she shot a bit of fire at it.

Against its mucus-covered skin, the fire didn’t have an effect.

Kir turned a corner and suddenly there was light. He could see the mouth of the cave and a large chamber filled with bones great and small in calcified puddles.

He picked up the pace, dashing with all his might until they escaped onto a red and black sanded shore covered in dark tidal pools.

The creature behind them shrieked but did not emerge, and Kir realized it likely couldn’t echolocate them outside the confines of the cave.

"So much for safe!" Stella griped as she left Kir’s grip.

The raptor was still clinging to him, breathing rapidly but no longer trying to hurt Kir. It seemed to have entered a state of shock, and Kir felt a little bad for it.

He started to pet its feathered head. "That wasn’t so bad," he said.

"We’re lucky that thing was too dumb to use magic. Did you see the stones in that place?" she asked.

"I was too busy running," Kir replied.

"Looked like a fucking hatchery. All those eggs in the walls," Stella said. "That thing had at least a low-grade purple mana crystal inside it, if my shopkeeper senses are correct."

"So it was a monster, not an animal." Kir took a moment to think. A purple mana crystal would fetch a gold strip if it was high enough quality, but it wasn’t worth it to go back in his opinion.

If they were starting to encounter monsters though, he’d expected they should have run into a stronger one first, given the mana concentrations. Unless they already had and he’d failed to categorize them properly because everything before the dragon floor had looked like what he would consider grotesques instead.

"Yep," Stella said. She looked even more purple in the red light of the floor’s environment.

As they walked away, much smaller, more docile versions of the thing that had attacked them stretched out into the water. They kept their long tails in the smaller pools while they grazed along the shallow beach. Like pale balloons with crab legs. Unlike the monster, these had crab-like eyestalks and more color to them.

They walked until they came upon a grove of mangrove-like trees with pale bark and pink leaves.

It was here that Kir decided to let the raptor go, and to his surprise, it just lay where he placed it, staring at him with tilts of its head, utterly exhausted. Maybe he’d crushed it or something, but it seemed a shame to let it go to waste if it wasn’t able to flee...

His stomach rumbled at the thought of a real meal.

"Sorry buddy," Kir said as he sat next to it, wondering if it would taste like chicken as he raised a clawed hand.

"Sorry buddy," the raptor parroted back.

And just like that, Kir’s appetite left again.

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