“Gaaaaaah!”
Lucifer’s body scattered into the abyss in fragments, twisted arms and legs, chunks of flesh, and his head falling into the nothingness of Cocytus.
“Yes, not even he can survive…” I started to say, but one of Lucifer’s huge arms was coming straight toward me. Even though his four limbs had all been torn off when he was caught between the Gravity Bombs, this arm still acted as if it had consciousness.
“Crap!” I cried as Lunaère moved between me and the arm using a teleportation spell. She grabbed his arm in her hands and used a fire magic spell to turn it to ash before letting it drift down into the abyss below.
“Thank you…Lunaère-san,” I said with a sigh of relief.
I looked down at all the pieces of Lucifer falling into the void. His head stared up at us, hatred in his eyes as it fell into the darkness.
“I am the greatest, most magnificent demon! I’m not like you puppets! This can’t be happening! This is bullshiiiiit!”
His head disappeared into the darkness, screaming curses at us the entire time.
“Awooooo!” Wolzottl suddenly climbed in the air, then snatched the Black Staff of the Apocalypse in his mouth as it fell back down from Lunaère’s earlier kick.
“Is Lucifer really dead…?” I murmured, staring into the depths where his head fell.
“I’m not sure. That was my first time against an enemy at that level. Demons are resilient to begin with. As surprising as it is, I think he may still be alive. Though, I never expected he’d be able to speak even after being turned into a decapitated head. We should have caught him before we lost sight and made sure to finish him off.” Lunaère’s eyes turned down to the abyss below.
“Seriously?!” I cried.
“Though, even he shouldn’t be able to do anything as just a head. He’ll probably just fall through this nothingness forever.”
“Huh…” I felt a little relieved. But despite everything, I also felt a little bad for him. “You know…he said he’s not like us puppets, but from the higher beings’ perspective, there probably isn’t that big a difference between humans, dragons, and ancient demons.”
I sighed.
Lucifer was basically a giant ball of arrogance in the form of a demon, which meant he couldn’t accept the fact that, in the end, he was still nothing more than one of the higher beings’ pawns. That’s why he made himself the most powerful being in Locklore and why he wanted to be the one to drop the final curtain.
That would prove he wasn’t like the other residents of the world, he wasn’t just a puppet.
There was talk that Reniement originally had a violent streak in him, but the faith he gained from his journey of training with Jonas allowed him to hold that back. The thing that made him go crazy was the truth he learned that everything he believed in was nothing more than a script written by the higher beings.
Reniement himself acknowledged the fact that he simply wanted a philosophy that affirmed his violent nature, but even with that being true, if he hadn’t learned the truth of Locklore, he probably never would have killed his master, Jonas.
In that way, both Reniement and Lucifer were just two more victims of the higher beings.
Both of them were people who planned to kill lots of people, and people who had actually caused similar incidents in the past that ended with them thrown in isolation. There wasn’t a single part of me that was going to forgive them for what they did.
But that didn’t also mean there wasn’t a single part of me that understood.
And it wasn’t like there was nothing in common between my situation and theirs. Those two went on rampages to build their own identity in a world controlled by the higher beings, and Lunaère and I were dragging the entire world of Locklore into a war against the higher beings in order to protect ourselves. There probably wasn’t that big a difference between us from the perspectives of the people of Locklore who just wanted to live peaceful lives.
“Ah… Ah…”
Just then, I heard some sort of…cry?
“Hm…?” I turned to look in the direction of the sound and saw a fragment of the former crystal pathway floating in the air. On it was some sort of gross lump of flesh.
I really couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. It had four eyes, short stubby forelegs, and short stubby hindlegs. But that odd, four-eyed fleshy thing seemed to be trying to tell us something. It looked up at me with desperation.
“That’s a very odd toad… Why is it here of all places?” asked Lunaère with her head cocked in confusion.
Then it hit me, a feeling that I’d seen that toad’s face before. “Wait…are you Satan?”
I saw Reniement turn humans into rats in the holy city of Luperm. If you could turn humans into rats, then it wouldn’t be that weird if you could turn demons into toads. And Lucifer seemed like the kind of guy to do that sort of thing.
Lunaère quickly flew over and scooped up the four-eyed toad in her hands.
“It appears you’ve been put under some sort of curse. Thanks to Lucifer, you went flying when he destroyed the place you were standing on. Let’s go back to the ninety-ninth floor first, then we can try undoing this curse.”