The Demon Lord Is An Angel-Chapter 411: The Knowing Curse

Malzkael let the words ’time war’ settle into her thoughts before she spoke. "Before we talk about something insane, what did you do to Anko?"

"She’ll be fine if that’s what you’re worried about. Consider it a test of her capacity to be educated. I don’t want blind loyalty, but neither do I want loyalty out of ignorance. The sort of people who want either assume they deserve it." Kiryu exhaled some smoke. "So. Time war."

Malzkael furrowed her brow. "Like in fiction?" Time-magic fiction wasn’t a genre she enjoyed since most angels wrote it as a form of wish fulfillment. Usually, such fiction meant an angel would breeze through social adversity, arriving at a superior position to some dreaded rival or even gaining power over them. Or an angel would arrive amongst primitive Aytherians and wind up being worshipped as a god.

"Yes," Kiryu replied, "Except this isn’t fiction. This body’s mother can see the future. And I think you know who the only angel that can do that is."

"The Daughter of Heaven," Malz replied. Yet even as she said it, she couldn’t believe it. All the accounts of her she knew of described her as kind and empathetic. "I find it hard to believe an angel would want to destroy the world. Maledict is the one who had it out for Heaven. I may not have seen it happen, but I know it has to have been him."

"It doesn’t matter who does the deed. She’s the one who selected for that to happen," Kiryu argued. "Morality doesn’t really play much into it, except in an ultimate sense."

"What’s that supposed to mean?" Malz hissed.

"It means that kind of power warps your values. Makes you less able to distinguish the ’goodness’ of one outcome over another, when what you want is what you consider the good outcome. Lives become pieces on a board. The thoughts and actions of your loved ones, when they become predictable and repeatable, cease to hold any value for the person behind them. People become events. The world becomes a game board you can swap for another."

"Personal experience?" Malz challenged. As much as she knew she shouldn’t piss him off, Kiryu irked her. His irreverent attitude reminded her too much of who she had been before years of torture and desperation had stripped it down. She was still an angel who loved wicked things, but the impression she had of Kiryu was that he was cruel.

"Bingo. But I’ve never had the ability to see the future... at least not in the sense that the angel we’re up against can."

"What’s a bingo?" Ferro asked.

"Don’t worry about that," Kiryu said. "Worry about the fact that, if everything happening right now indicates what I think it does, then we’re already more than proverbially fucked."

"How fucked?" Malz asked.

Kiryu tapped the table a few times, before puffing his pipe. "I remember running calculations on the sizes of both moons while I was trapped in Kir’s head. The canopy of all those big trees hid a lot, but finding out the individual plates that comprised the surface of Heaven are about three kilometers per side leads me to believe that there are somewhere between forty and sixty thousand fragments to account for. Add about five hundred thousand kilometers for a long run-up, and the impacts from that amount of acceleration get deadly."

"But there’s something that can be done about it, right?" Malz pressed.

"If the one with power in this situation allows it, yes. It’s not me, by the way. It’s the one with the power of prophecy who has the power to direct this madness, even if she doesn’t control the physics." He exhaled a long breath. "As far as physics is concerned, destroying the fragments is what I’ve been working on. I have ideas about where to start... but if even one percent of those fragments hits Ayther, it’s game over. An ice age, at the very least. The extinction of life on the planet, at most. Not sure how dungeons-"

"That’s why I’m here!" Ferro interrupted, hand on his compass. The device had done nothing but pulse ever since they entered the building, at least according to Malz’s memory. "It was hard to understand, but Luda said they want to help you. They said I was supposed to give you a message."

Kiryu froze where he sat, a sadness rising in his eyes. Instead of answering he looked down at the table and continued to inhale from his pipe. "And if I don’t want to hear it?"

That is not normal behavior, Malz reminded herself. But what is normal nowadays? I’m traveling with a fanatic and a madman... sitting in the home of a mad "god" with no idea of what’s happening except the end of the world... I need to focus on what’s important. Get back to Heaven or whatever is left of it and find Rain and Cassiel. They’ll listen to me about Maledict...

Malz was so caught up in her thoughts that she failed to notice when the conversation between Kiryu and Ferro ended. The compass was flying across the table to Kiryu’s waiting hand, trailing the silvery helix of Ferro’s enchanted necklace.

After a few seconds, the ringing began, but instead of both articles reappearing on Ferro’s neck, the compass stayed in Kiryu’s hand while the necklace lurched across the distance to land between Malz and Ferro. The next moment, the compass began to spin on its own, hovering as the image of a human began to form around it.

After a few seconds, the image resolved into an androgynous person with brown hair and a wide smile under intelligent eyes. Eyes that stared down where Kiryu sat, but did not seem to see him.

"Hey, tall boy," the hologram began. "I know you... have your doubts about me, still... but I’m just glad you’re alive."

"For now," Kiryu muttered.

"For now, yes, I know..." the hologram said, almost overlapping the demon, whose lips twisted slightly. "I know what’s happening to you... and I know you don’t have a lot of time, so I’m... altering the prophet’s plan a little. It’ll be much faster if you can just produce the beacons up there. Less intensive for you, I think... but yes, you already have some