It Really Did Look Like Wings

Merea was tearing through Mūzeg's spell-corps with the speed of lightning — closing, hitting, gone again before any opening could form.

By now, no one left on that battlefield doubted his strength.

If anything, they'd started to look at him with awe.

"— Wait, what the hell is that?"

The 〈Fist Emperor〉, swinging fists shoulder-to-shoulder with Merea, broke off long enough to notice.

With Mūzeg's spell-soldiers down to a final few, he caught sight of the golden ship sliding down the flank of the Sacred Mountain of Lindholm.

The thing came skittering and grating its way along the gravel — bizarre enough on its own.

Just ahead of its descent, an ice path was forming in step with it. Spell-work, obviously. The question was whose.

"It's the twins!"

He spotted them.

From what passed for windows in the golden ship, two small girls were beaming out, evidently enjoying themselves. The spell-circles spreading from their open palms were laying the ice path down as fast as the hull could meet it.

A third face appeared from another window — 〈Alchemy King〉 Shaw.

He'd told the man to think up an escape plan. He hadn't expected the solution to look quite like this.

What an eyesore.

"All righty, everybody on board! — Three gold coins per head, and we're rolling!"

"You're running a business down here?!"

What a piece of work.

"I'll put it on a tab!"

"It's daylight robbery either way!"

"Then by all means, stay where you are and get yourselves killed by Mūzeg's main body coming up from below, or the Saisalis fanatics coming in from the south!"

"Right, getting on!"

The 〈Fist Emperor〉 grabbed the nearest Demon Lord by the wrist and started running.

The hand he'd grabbed turned out to belong to 〈Flame Emperor〉 Lilium.

"H-huh?! Wait — what is this all of a sudden?!"

"You don't want to die, do you?! This is the chance to get off the mountain — onto that ship, now!"

He didn't wait for an answer. Just hauled the girl bodily along.

The ship had drawn level with the engagement and was decelerating. The ice path had stopped, and gravel was biting back at the hull.

"Right — over to you, maid! Catch this clean!"

His shout cracked the air as he hurled Lilium into space.

Marisa already had her torso out of one of the windows, gesturing impatiently with both hands — throw, faster.

He'd seen her at the gravework. Her strength wasn't human.

And the ship couldn't afford to dawdle. There was no time for nicety.

So Lilium, aimed and pitched with care, was caught with neat precision by the maid-uniformed Marisa and stowed inside.

The two of them were treating each other like cargo, but cargo was the most this moment afforded.

Get yelled at later, he thought, and moved on.

He gathered up several other Demon Lords in turn and pitched them through the windows after Lilium, then at last slid himself in.

The rest had already started for the ship under their own power.

To rally them, he leaned out and roared again.

"If you're running, come on! — No, come on! You climbed all the way up this mountain because, against all odds, you wanted to live! Then act like it!"

The Demon Lords still on foot quickened up at the sound.

Then he turned the same voice on the snow-white-haired man who'd been their saviour.

"You too, Merea!! Said you've never come down off this mountain — well, today's the day! Come with us!"

It was the strongest cry he'd put out yet.

Nothing performative about it. It came from the bottom of him, on Merea's behalf.

That Merea was abnormally strong, he'd learned in the last few minutes. Forced to learn, more accurately.

But there were still too many of them.

Stay any longer and they'd be encircled — Mūzeg's main body, plus however many other national forces were tracking the rest of the Demon Lords up the mountain from other directions.

Whether Merea was actually a Demon Lord remained unconfirmed. But there was still the matter of the 〈Future Stone〉.

Above all —

That much power. There's no chance they leave him alone.

Mūzeg, certainly. Saisalis, certainly. The whole reason they were chasing Demon Lords up a mountainside in the first place was the appetite to seize and use power. Walk away from a man like Merea? Out of the question for them.

Then — out of the question for him, either.

Whether Merea came down with them and stayed after, or just came down and parted ways, made no difference. Just get the man off this mountain alive.

So the 〈Fist Emperor〉 bellowed, and bellowed again.

"Come on!! Get on the ship!!"

One after another, the Demon Lords leapt aboard.

Last on the field were Merea, at the foremost line, and the 〈Sword Emperor〉 Elma, fighting beside him.

But —

Then, with bad timing, the 〈Fist Emperor〉 caught a sound that didn't belong.

It came from the side opposite Merea and Elma. Just behind them, on the diagonal —

"There they are!! After them!!"

— that voice.

Close. Too close.

And the answering shouts that followed —

Damn it. There are a lot of them.

He whipped over to the opposite window and looked.

"— Shit."

Black armour. Black armour. Black armour.

The black of Mūzeg's military livery.

Mūzeg's close-combat infantry, sealed into that miserable, blood-curdling black, came pouring into view in numbers that turned the gut over.

A glance was enough. This was a different order of magnitude from the spell-corps they'd just put down.

"Twins! Pick up the speed! Now!!"

He rapped a fist on the rim of the window, voice tight.

Two Mūzeg soldiers had broken from the front of that black column ahead of the rest, sprinting to lay hands on the ship.

He swatted them off — but the next wave was already coming up behind.

Any further deceleration was death.

Too many of them to take honestly.

The only way out was through.

The other Demon Lords had begun intercepting whatever soldiers got close to the hull. He left them to it and stuck his head back out of the window facing Merea and Elma.

The two had just dispatched the last of the spell-soldiers between them.

Make it.

The golden ship was accelerating in earnest now.

Much faster, and even Merea — moving like a struck bolt minutes ago — might not catch it.

It was a slope without a road. In a posture barely distinguishable from outright rolling, the ship had abandoned all dignity and was simply sliding. Running, by comparison, meant scratching your footing out of nothing — slower, harder, less stable.

So he was thinking when at last Merea looked back.

The red of his eyes showed.

"Come!!"

The last shout.

— Got through.

Merea moved.

A single backward sweep of the head confirmed the spell-soldiers around him had been cleared. Then he caught the 〈Sword Emperor〉 Elma's hand, wrapped himself in white lightning, and tore toward the ship.

"Whoa—"

Elma's small startled noise.

The slope had grown steep enough that the ship was beginning to list forward.

Acceleration.

Gold riding the path of ice.

Merea closed the gap in a heartbeat and ran alongside the hull, handing Elma over as he went.

The 〈Fist Emperor〉 caught her and pulled her in.

Then —

"Your hand!"

He thrust an arm out for Merea.

The golden ship was now sliding at an alarming pace.

Merea was keeping level — barely.

Then —

"Tch — Oi—!"

Merea tripped on something.

Hardly a wonder. He was running down a freakish gradient with formula-crafted lightning wrapped around him, accelerating into the descent. That he'd handed Elma off cleanly was, looking back, already a miracle.

And in that moment, against his will, the 〈Fist Emperor〉's mind locked onto the one failure this whole escape was going to be remembered for.

---

He nearly threw himself out of the ship.

In the space of one stumble, the gap between hull and Merea blew wide open.

…This is bad.

The ship: still accelerating.

Merea: shedding speed.

Could he close it back from there?

His worry for Merea felt the same as worry for himself. The fear made the next moments crawl, slow and ugly, the way they do when you're staring at something you can't reach.

He watched Merea pitch forward, and he watched Merea catch himself with uncanny balance.

Between the slope's pitch and the angle of his stumble, for an instant Merea looked less like a man running and more like a man falling straight down.

The right foot Merea threw out to right himself crashed into the mountain — left a crater behind in the ground.

A leg's strength that did not fit his body. A footstrike with the weight to break stone.

From there he set himself to accelerate again, and yet —

Pulling away.

Merea was getting smaller.

Slowly. Gradually. Steadily.

That single moment of stall had bloomed into a gap that wasn't going to close.

The 〈Fist Emperor〉, urgency clawing at him, turned to the twins working the path.

"Oi! Can you slow this thing down?!"

"C-can't!" "The slope's too steep!"

The twins were right. The ship was on a gradient that, ice-path or no, would have it sliding faster and faster regardless. The momentum it had picked up running on ice was carrying it now; cutting off the path wasn't going to be enough to stop it.

A thread of real despair worked its way into the 〈Fist Emperor〉's chest, and he turned again to look at Merea.

Something about the small, distant figure was wrong.

"What in the world—"

From Merea's back, even at this distance, enormous white wings appeared to be unfolding.

It was an odd, fluid shape — almost as if the wind itself had bent into the form. But there was no other word for it.

It really did look like wings.