The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 97: Speed Run, Reverse Boss Order

Chapter 97: Speed Run, Reverse Boss Order

Kir crunched through the bones of a... well, he just had to think of it as a chicken.

In truth he’d thought at first that it was a rabbit, but when Cheshire brought it back to share, it had become very clear that whatever it was covered in had more in common with feathers than fur.

He’d named Cheshire such because her feathers followed a two-toned pattern of light and dark, iridescent rainbow feathers, and because Stella refused to let him call her "Spot". The raptor had shouted that word for a whole day upon learning it, and Stella didn’t want to be reminded of the times she didn’t "spot" mistakes in her math, especially now that Kir was starting to integrate physics.

"Fix that spot." "Look at this spot." "Did you spot why..." were common phrases that came up a lot in their lessons, and Cheshire had latched onto the word as one of her favorites. Her other favorite words seemed to be every swear word equally.

Also, Cheshire felt like a good name, considering the rabbit hole of an adventure they were on and the fact she acted like a cat sometimes, albeing one determined to nest in Kir’s hair while he slept.

The little raptor snapped greedily into the entrails and bonier half of the creature, which Kir had cooked slowly over a fire, with a pinch of crushed pink mana stone from a leech-like monster that had latched onto him in the last biome; a freshwater bog.

It wasn’t very flavorful, but it was better than nothing. Mostly it was the bits of fat and char from cooking it that made the stringy meat edible.

Stella, to his surprise, had asked to try some, so he’d given her one of its six legs, which she was still turning over in her hand trying to figure out where to bite.

Kir swallowed. "Stars, I feel human again," he smiled, looking up into the treeline of the forest they were in.

"Human? Really?" Stella said, looking at him weirdly.

Kir realized the phrase had just slipped out, but this was the sort of thing he was used to backpedaling with Rain and Kordia. "I was raised by a human, remember? It’s just a figure of speech."

"The figure of speech goes you feel like a person again. No one who isn’t the thing they’re saying they feel like says they feel like that thing- wait..." She paused to ruminate on whether what she’d just said made sense before continuing. "And I saw your moms, dumbass. One’s an elf, yet you constantly refer to yourself as human. And while we’re here, you know things I have trouble thinking anyone would know. You know things that Maledict doesn’t, and he’s practically a god who has hundreds of years on both of us combined. Why is that?" Stella’s face came forward a bit to try for a bite but she stopped herself.

"Maledict doesn’t know everything," he gestured at the chicken drum in her hand. "You wanted to try solid food so give it a try. Keep stopping yourself and it’ll get cold," Kir warned. Internally he was frowning because he’d failed to notice how observant Stella was becoming yet again. "Won’t be a pleasant first time eating."

"Keep avoiding my questions and I’ll get cold," Stella snarked back. "Meaning no more draining for you."

"Wait, are you offering to withhold sex?" Kir burst out laughing. "Wow... I never thought I’d hear that from you, succubus."

"I’m still all-demon, dick. That’s a threat, not an offer." Stella tossed the leg back onto the fire.

Kir plucked it out of the ashes and shook it for a moment before placing it on the rock he’d used for cooking. "I call that growth," he stuck out his massive tongue.

"You know for someone who says ’Don’t be a dick!’ all the time, you sure like being one now and again. And not in a fun way," Stella crossed her arms.

Cheshire looked up from her meal. "Dick!" she said.

"See, Cheshy agrees with me," Stella said. The two got along quite well now, mostly because Stella had been testing some of her mental manipulation magic on it. "So how about you stop with avoiding my question like you have to be the most mysterious person in the world and answer the big fucking mystery, Kir. Otherwise, I’m going to think you really don’t want equality in our relationship, because at this point I have told you everything there is to know about me."

The last few days together had been enough for Kir to finally work a lot of things out with Stella, especially as she grew into her increasingly eidetic memory and accelerating intellect. That growth had been very attractive to him, and she’d found more things than his body to like about him...

Yet the more she wanted his knowledge, the more Kir was discovering there were many more things he had to keep from her. And the more he wanted to like her, openly and genuinely instead of the back and forth of purely physical attraction, the more she seemed to want to keep from him.

Thus, they’d settled into an odd detente, as far as their relationship was concerned, and the stress of it came up in sharp words, pointed questions, and the gathering storm of words unsaid.

Maledict was another point of contention. Underneath her sometimes-sharp words about him, she clearly worshipped Kir’s father. For his power, if nothing else. A power that had allowed her to be reshaped into a form that she’d hoped would make her someone worth remembering in Hell.

For Kir, learning that she’d been experimented upon had left him with conflicted feelings. On the one hand, she’d volunteered. On the other, the lack of ethical rigor coupled with what was a decidedly pseudo-scientific approach was abhorrent to his very core.

Intellectually he understood that survival as demons meant a constant seeking out of advantages and that it was not Hell’s fault that they were denied other avenues of expression. But emotionally, the things Stella indicated to him made Maledict sound like he leaned into some of the worst instincts a person could have... Instincts Kir sensed within himself.

Kir knew his father was a tyrant. From Stella’s tales of Maledict’s exploits and his foes, he knew that Maledict would never allow any true challenge to his power. It was easy to be a tyrant in Hell. Yet hidden in Stella’s lessons about Hell were the facts that the Dukedom of Heresy was one of the most stable, diverse, and powerful nations of hell despite being the smallest... and Kir’s past life memories showed him far worse states of tyranny than the merely medieval ones of Ayther and its moons.

Neither knew what would happen after this adventure, but whatever did happen would be predicated on whether or not Kir could get Maledict to end the contract. And until then, Kir had promised to trust her and never compel her again with magic.

He’d never promised to tell her the truth about himself, but the fact she wanted it... Did she want to stick around with him after the contract after all? As flattering as that was to his ego, so long as the contract existed and she bore a Forbidding, she was his father’s demon, able to be compelled by the man who’d tried to kill Kir’s mothers once.

"It’s complicated," Kir said to buy himself time.

"Simplify. The. Equation," Stella replied aggressively, emphasizing each syllable as she threw words from his math lessons back at him.

"I’m not sure I can-"

"Then you can figure out how to jerk yourself off with those cow-rippers, dick." Stella’s wings flared and she flew off.

Kir was left staring after her, wondering what the hell had just happened.

"Dick!" Cheshire squawked, poking its tongue toward the now-charring leg.

Kir sighed and used a pair of his "cow rippers" to pinch the charred leg by the meat before dropping it in front of Cheshire.

"Why is it so hard to understand her sometimes?" he asked the creature, who ignored him in favor of the food. After another moment of thought, he sighed and stood.

He called out Stella’s name in the direction she’d flown, but she was gone. Prodding the cooking stone off the fire, he stomped out the embers and threw some dirt on what remained before pursuing.

Cheshire would be fine. As the last couple of rooms and her general cowardice in regard to fights had proven, she could find them at her leisure.

Unable to effectively fly in the forest, Kir was forced to start walking as he began his search.

Ten minutes of walking later, he finally saw her sitting still on a rock.

"There you are," he reached out, "I’m sorry if I was being rude back there... Can we go back and talk about-" His hand went right through her, and the illusion disappeared into motes of mana.

Kir had only a moment to think, Oh no.

Then the ambush began.