The Demon Lord Is An Angel-Chapter 494: Rapture

From there, Kir finally turned to the sigil core and Orby to craft suits and weapons that would be more than equal to any armor for each of them. He made each with a theme. Deep blue for Rain. Silver for Kordia. Gold for Cassiel. Red-Orange for Sin. Purple for Lapins - at her request.

There wasn’t time to teach everyone the proper workings, especially since that would require some mastery of the sigil core, so Kir instead focused on putting passive and semi-active defensive spells into each. Especially flight magic. Forming the suits completely from mana would make them far more responsive and efficient to use, but also more fragile and draining to repair.

Kir figured he’d do it properly once they had time. As such, everything he managed to create had taken enough time that the wall of destruction was past the enclosure of Kir’s space, and pushing against the contact it had with the Chainsfree shield dome. Below them, a wall of ocean water was slipping over the mountains, chasing the remnants of Aaru’s army as it flooded the desert.

Kir felt pity for the soldiers, but less for any slavers that might be in their midst. As the others took a few brief moments to listen to Ferro, Malz, and Aiko explain some of the workings of their new suits, Kir quietly memorized the locations of each person he could see on the shattering land below.

After watching the others for a long time, Crimson leaped from Sin’s shoulders and took his full form, staring down at the princess he’d traveled with since that fateful encounter at the chasm.

"You’ve grown far beyond your mother’s expectations... and in so short a time," the spirit chuckled. "I find myself thinking that perhaps it’s time I return to my worshippers before they lose faith. They’ll need someone to guide them through the muck of what’s happening." Crimson gave Kir a pointed look, as if sensing his curiosity.

Kir had connected the dots between some of his more distant feelings, Crimson’s casual mention of how worshipped he was, and Kiryu’s theories. While Kiryu seemed right in that people couldn’t get power from worship, at least not in a magical sense, they could certainly give power through the act. It was something akin to how, as an incubus, he was attuned to lustful thoughts that were specifically about him.

But there was no time to test these theories, and so Kir simply nodded his head and gestured to the side, making a portal that led as close to the capital as he had ever gone.

A gate to the glideway field nearest to Gra’Rhuel’s capital. The glideway field, with its lonely tower and a few warehouses, looked undisturbed in its frozen state. The forests of Gra’Rhuel surrounded the little circle like a protective nest of green, unaware of the destruction rushing towards it along and through the world.

Before Crimson could pass through, Sin suddenly appeared at the spirit’s side, hugging the spirit fox’s foreleg.

"I’ll miss you," she said, burying her face in Crimson’s red fur.

The fox spirit gave her a cocky chuckle, telling her, "It looks like you can take care of yourself now," before heading out into what was still early morning in Gra’Rhuel.

And for the others, the gate he made to Aaru, using Kiryu’s memories, would let them out on the rooftop of a two-story building. Through the near-frozen image, they saw a flooded city with crowds on plank-connected roofs, the higher portions of the city holding the largest crowds as they stared eastward towards the second dawn of the shard fall and its oncoming destructive wave.

Kir hugged everyone and shared a few short words with each embrace before he watched as everyone held hands and approached the portal.

"I’ll catch up to you as soon as I can," Kir promised. He only hoped he could...

At the last step, Rain turned his head and said, "Good hunting, Kir," before he blurred forward and through the portal to the real world.

Kir didn’t know how long it would take him to search out and destroy the remaining shards, but he vowed he’d find a way to help them as soon as he was done.

But that left him with one final decision to make...

"What do I do with this place?" Kir asked the open air.

"You could take it with you," Amida said, appearing by his side. "That’s what I do."

"What do you mean?" Kir asked.

"I mean... this place is sort of like what you call a dungeon. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we are also a sort of... living dungeon. As you can see, we can define our spaces. Connect them to places we know or create... Mine is where I go when I’m not outside. If you discard this place, it will mean giving up a lot of mana, and it’ll probably just merge with the nearby dungeon. But it won’t kill you like it would those, uh, weaker godlings you created. "

"You mean to tell me dungeons come from gods?" Kir asked. "Dead gods?"

"Godlings," Amida corrected. "There’s really only the one god... that’s Luda. Or, well, that might have changed if... I don’t know what my siblings have been up to."

Kir sighed. There was too much happening for him to handle yet another world-redefining revelation. "I’ll have more to ask about that when there’s time," he said. "But for now... thank you for the advice."

"Any time, little brother," Amida smiled.

Kir reached with his senses into the space around him, finding he instinctively knew how to draw it into himself.

The moment he disconnected from the Chainsfree dome, he felt a wave of emptiness as he lost contact with the nigh-infinite mana that had coursed through him, but he knew it was for the best.

Time was running out.

The moment he was free, Kir bent his power towards a single task: Acceleration.

He needed all the speed of thought he could muster, and so he discarded his form for something small and compact, a sphere of light surrounding his core. And then the world blinked away and back. Away and back. Each flash a different place, a different person, that Kir would save... 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

*

A soldier felt the moment a shard of stone cut her cheek. Shock caused her to trip, twisting her ankle as she fell before the flowing wall of death. She closed her eyes and suddenly there was light, and she opened her eyes to find herself in Aaru, surrounded by her fellow soldiers in the hundreds, who stared about in disbelief.

*

Amidst the tumult of waves, a ship approached the dome protecting Chainsfree. It was the Queen of Iron, torn to pieces as its passengers and crew drowned. A certain doctor’s mind was filled with regret, even as her lungs filled with fire. In a flash of light, she found herself inside a city she’d never seen before.

A woman waited with a shocked expression on her face, hyenakin, and those around her jumped in surprise as more souls from the Queen of Iron were deposited before them in fractions of a second, and then more besides...

After sputtering water from her lungs, Lusci stared up at the hyenakin and gasped. "W-where are we?"

"You’re in Norneau," the woman explained, crouching down and inspecting Lusci’s neck where her slave brand and its golden contract circle had been seared into her skin. "And don’t worry, you’re free now."

"F-free? Are you B-Breakers?"

"Nah, stranger, we’re Ghosthearts."

*

Sitting on the shore, a demoness surrounded by nearly a dozen of her kind watched with a single eye as destruction sped its way towards them. She was in pain from mana corruption, but she didn’t feel it as she faced death.

A whimper broke her from her reverie and she stood, holding the hand of a youth who had lost so much when their village had fled from Hell, and then again when a half-angel named Rainier fell into their midst...

It felt a shame to survive so much, only for the end to come anyway...

A ball of light appeared at one edge of the shore, and suddenly a demon was gone. Then another and another, faster than she could react. Princess had barely pulled Bait into a hug as the orb finally appeared before them both, and suddenly they weren’t standing amidst the rocky pebbles of an unnamed Diurnus shore but amidst a city square, surrounded by their own kind.

Demons who regarded them with looks of surprise as a blue dome continued its descent in the background.

"Where... what is this?"

A demoness with an air of command turned from one of the villagers who’d disappeared first. "This is Norneau... welcome to Little Hell."

*

Onward Kir pushed, chasing the leading edge of the storm as he looked for anyone alive, stretching every second he could into minutes, hours, days of subjective time as he sent person after person to the places he knew.

He lost count quickly, but it didn’t matter to him as long as he could get everyone he could out of immediate danger, though in hundreds of cases, he chose not to save those who wore the mark of the Syndicate proudly on their chests, treating every one of those wasted lives as time for another to be saved as he teleported from horizon to horizon, searching for lost, unlucky souls...

But when a light from above entered the atmosphere, Kir turned his gaze skyward and teleported to the triangle of burning metal. He reached out with mana to contact the shard, but the moment he tried to teleport it away from the planet, everything suddenly... stilled.

Kir returned to his form as a bubble of stillness contained him and the shard, forcing him back to regular time as destruction flowed beneath the dewdrop of mana.

A waiting figure leaned against a protrusion of steel. He strummed a lute with clawed fingers as a crown of fire blazed between his horns.

"Hello, son."