The Demon Lord Is An Angel-Chapter 481: War Of Iron - Part 11 - - house

Retreating to the Chapterhouse turned out to be far harder than Anko and Malz first anticipated, but after a half dozen running battles, they made it.

But the closer they actually got to the Chapterhouse, the harder it was to wrangle Kir.

"Come on, you big lug!" She tried to block Kir as much as she could without actually touching him. "Malz, what are you doing?!"

"Trying not to die!" she shouted from a few measures away as she shielded herself from and then shot an enemy archer. "Looks like nobody’s back from the wall yet," she said as she grabbed Kir by the wrist and tugged him.

He resisted for a moment, but Malz wasn’t in the mood for it as she pulled and pushed him out of the alleyway and across the drawbridge into the Chapterhouse.

Despite the damage to the building, it was still one of the most defensible spots, and now the courtyard was filled with civilians who sat or stood while waiting for the battle to end. Of one corner, a warrior with a blue sash with his arm in a sling, showed a few boys and girls the basics of how to use spears, but it was clear this was mostly to keep their minds off the battle raging outside.

The section of wall that had disappeared into light had been partially filled with furniture, and a pair of mages kept shields going to cover everyone from stray spells.

She’d barely dragged Kir in when he started trying to walk through the hall without them.

"What’s the matter with you?!" Anko raised her voice as she jogged out in front of him.

"Kir..." He pointed at an angle through the wall, as if there was something he saw through it, and Malz looked through the nearby arrow slit to find... nothing. He was pointing at a building with no one in it... Malz looked again, focusing on her manasight. There was a lot of mana in that building, but it could have been several mages.

"What is it?" Anko asked.

"I don’t know. I think... he knows something is over there?" Malz was about to pull herself away when she saw a hint of a white wing in the window. "Shit. There’s an angel in there."

"I’ll take care of it-"

"No!" Malz grabbed Anko by the arm. "Let me be useful for once. I’ve got a spell that’ll let me check it out. Whatever they’re up to could be big."

"What do you need?" Anko asked.

"Just... keep Kir out of trouble. And look out for Ferro. Oh, and I won’t be very cognizant of my surroundings while I’m using this spell, so a chair would be nice."

"Cog-what?"

"Just get me a chair real quick." Malz sighed.

"Alright, gods, I’m going." As Malz held Kir by the wrist, Anko strode over to a guard, removing the chair from under him with a swipe. He protested and swore until she glared him down. Then she returned to it and placed it heavily next to Malz.

After sitting, Malz decided that moving away from the arrow slit by a measure was the most prudent thing she could do before she began to weave together her scrying spell.

She wasn’t terribly concerned for her safety but when she felt a poke on her cheek she turned her scrying eye around to find Anko poking at her unconscious-seeming body. The way she flopped was rather undignified, but she mentally rolled her eyes and slipped the semi-intangible orb through the arrow slit.

*

Valera spotted the small bubble of magic leaving the fortress as she whispered for her team to stop moving. Beneath her, the only climbers she was sure of, beastkin all, twitched their ears in response to her barely audible command.

She’d been scryed on before, and wanted to make sure they weren’t spotted. Fortune favored her, she thought, as she watched the orb track across the street, entering the bottom floor of the structure there.

Atop the wall, guards patrolled with their spellcasting focuses in hand. It might have been easier physically to go for the side of the building that had been vaporized by the Lance of Heaven, but Val was not a fool. She knew they would have more guards there, just as she also knew the difficulty of dismantling barricades under fire.

Most infiltrators would have waited until the guards passed, but Val was confident in her skills. She waited until the anti-angel fire lulled and two guards came together before leaping up and slashing their heads off with her cutlass. That was the signal for her climbers to finish their ascents.

One, a maven who could make blades of air, sent a slash down the left side, while she sped along the right to clear the tower.

The other two rolled out ships’ ladders, and from across the street, mercenaries charged and climbed swiftly, with as much silence as the fear of her could instill.

Valera lifted her hips and legs off the ground before drop-kicking the door open, launching a guard who had been leaning on the other side into the opposite wall as she landed and spun, cutlass and claws filling the air with death as two more guards fell to her attack. A fourth who had paused at the top of the stairwell fled towards the outside, but before he could shout a warning, Valera buried her cutlass into his back with a toss.

Unfortunately for her, that blocked the stairwell just long enough for a guard atop the tower to notice and shout, "We’re under attack!"

Valera charged up the stairs anyway, shoving the dead guard aside before tearing into the shouting guard. She came away with bloody claws, but it was too late for the defenders as her team of thirty swarmed the battlements. After using a bit of magic to clean her hands, she turned to retrieve her cutlass, only to spot the body of the dead guard slipping over the crenellation and into the moat.

"Fuck," she stared down at the splash, feeling a bad omen in her guts.

But bad omen or not, she had a battle to end and pay to make.

Drawing her shotgun and checking the chambers to make sure it was still loaded and ready, she muttered, "Time to see what you can do."

*

Anko tapped her foot as she waited, leaning next to the wall as Malz made weird faces into the void and started crying. She was about to try shaking her awake when Malz gasped and let out a breath.

"It’s Rainier..." she sniffed and wiped her eyes with the hand she’d been using to hold Kir’s wrist. "Cass-"

"Who?" Anko asked, a look of complete ignorance on her face.

"Rainier, my boyfriend..."

Anko shrugged with all four arms, her gaze flickering at Kir to the left of Malz. He was still staring at the wall with a puzzled look on his face.

"Oh, come on, I told you about him."

"I don’t remember names if they’re not important!" Anko raised her voice. "Oh wait, is he the boyfriend who was also boyfriends with your girlfriend?"

"F-"

A sudden Bang! cut off whatever it was Malz was about to say, and a moment later, a corpse fell to the ground from above the courtyard.

The shield mages turned and tried to put up a fight, but were quickly overwhelmed by spells before being shot with arrows. Beyond them, the Chainsfreers were clashing with enemies.

"Listen up!" A feminine voice shouted. "We’re taking over. Tell us where your leaders are, and I assure you, you will not be enslaved."

A woman stood, just some random woman with marks on her wrists. Behind her, several more civilians, mostly young and old, stood.

"We are Chainsfreers," the woman said, her accent heavily Rethan. "Our vow is ’Nevermore in irons.’ We are free and we will die free, slaver."

A figure leaped down, a short, catkin woman with a big hat and a weird weapon in hand.

"That was rather the idea," the enemy leader said emotionlessly.

"Shit. Anko-"

Before Malz could stop her, Anko pounced, only for the catkin to turn and blast her backward into the wall, the slug punching straight through a hex in her shield but breaking against her suit, leaving a grey smear and a small iron spike.

Anko groaned, but at least she managed to keep her knives in hand. She threw one and drew three more, rotating all of them into an overhand grip.

The next shot the catkin sent at her was aimed for the head, but at the last moment, Malz put up a tiny pair of hexagonal shields, which softened the round enough that it bounced off Anko’s shield.

As Anko stood, the catkin spun out of the way of a spell from Malz, reloading behind a pillar as her men leaped down from the battlements and engaged the defenders and civilians.

Suddenly, Anko’s wrist was grabbed, and she was pulled behind a pillar just as the catkin attacker rolled out from her cover and fired. "Anko, Kir’s gone!" Malz said in a rush.

There wasn’t time to think, but Anko knew what she wanted to do.

"Go find him. I’ll take care of this." For a moment, she thought Malz might hug her, but instead, the angel ripped the spike out from between Anko’s ribs and slapped her with a quick healing spell.

"Don’t die," she said.

"Get going," Malz hissed through the pain, took two breaths, and leaped back into the fray.