Azrael climbed through her window and collapsed onto the floor. He looked at his hands and feet as if they had been poorly sewn on, shaking them around like sock puppets. For a Lesser God, he had the dexterity of a toddler. Momo assumed this was because he was piloting this body remotely—kind of like a military man flying a human drone.
“Wonderful interior,” he commented, taking notice of all of the room’s Morgana-themed embellishments. He picked up his legs as if they were heavy bags of sand and trudged towards the couch, falling in a heap upon the pillows.
“T–thanks,” Momo mumbled. Her eyes traveled from him to the gaping crater that once was her window. The sky had started to crackle with lightning. It had been a starry, cloudless night just a moment before, but now rain poured, thunder clapped, and wind gusted, blowing through her room like a mighty draft.
“I doubt I have much time, so I will make this snappy,” Azrael said, yawning. “But Gods—it is hard to think straight. This body is simply exhausted. I did wake it from its slumber in the city morgue, parade it through town, scare a variety of civilians, then scale the length of this tower with it, but are human bodies really so feeble? I can hardly remember.”
Momo didn’t respond to that. She was too busy constructing a thin barrier of Nether over the gaping window-hole so the air would stop blowing over her valuables. Azrael didn’t seem to notice her distress. He reached for the coffee table in front of him, plucking her sketchbook off of it. He flipped to the first page.
“Ah, yes, I remember this curious little… drawing book,” he said, eyes glowing. “This is the book you brought with you from the Other-World. Your most treasured possession. Ah, seeing it really brings me back. You know, from the very moment that I first saw you, I had high hopes. We both did, Valerica and I. She thought you’d make a great delivery girl. A fine undercover agent. But I saw a different potential in you. We watched different scenes in your life, you see. Monitored you from different angles.”
That got Momo’s attention. She finished her job of sealing off the window, and craned her head.
“You were spying on me too?” she sighed. She wasn’t even surprised. All those jokes people on Earth made about having FBI agents in their computers were only a little bit off-base. What you really had to be worried about were death-wizards from other universes peering into your business.
“But of course,” he said, grinning. “I was actually the one to bring you to her attention. I saw this most peculiar moment in your life. It was the day that you left home for college. There was this… quality in you. The lackluster observer would label it meekness, hesitance. But what I saw was something else entirely—a most powerful longing. A yearning clawing at your soul. The way you simply stared at your family and said nothing. The way they did the same with you.”
Momo’s jaw clenched. She could remember the exact moment he was talking about. It was the last time she saw her family. They had driven Momo all the way from San Francisco to Albany, each of them taking turns at the wheel and listening to Dad’s favorite music tapes—Japanese pop albums from the 70s. Classics sung by Momo. Not her, Momo, but the niche Jpop artist she was named after. “She’s so talented,” her dad would say every time, as if he hadn’t played the same discs for her entire childhood. “Amazing singer. Nothing like this on the radio these days.”
Her mom would always look out the window when those songs played, feigning jealousy. Momo knew it was an act. She always caught her mouthing the lyrics.
For her family, everything was always a coordinated performance. Everyone had a specific part to play, even during an exhausting 42-hour drive from coast to coast. It wasn’t just her parents, but her brother, too. He’d always make a big show of turning off Dad’s music once he was up to drive. He’d blast Eminem and 2Pac until Mom screamed at him to turn it off. “American music,” she’d always say, as if that said everything.
Momo’s role to play in the family-roadtrip circus was simple. When it was her turn to drive, her father would say, “ah, now we must wear our seatbelts,” and laugh hard at his own joke. Mom would put on her seatbelt—make a huge display out of it, actually—gripping the car door like it might fall off. Dae-hyun would beg her to keep the Eminem playing, but she always turned the music off.
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She had never been good at focusing on two things at once.
“Momo?” Azrael said, snapping her out of her thoughts. “Not to alarm you, but it appears that my time here might be shorter than planned.”
A deafening crack of thunder roared from outside. The entire tower shook.
“What was that?” Momo said, alarmed. She steadied herself on the bed frame. Dusk peeked her tiny head from beneath the bed, blinking up at Momo in confusion.
“Sera, I suppose,” he said. “She has sensed my presence, like all of those other times when she was quick to strike me down. Thinking of it now, she must be employing Guinevere somehow. Hm, and Nerida, too. There’s no reason that Sera by herself should be able to control the weather. A pact of cooperation between those three—that is indeed troublesome. But let’s not dwell on that for now. Let’s address your request.”
His voice had gone hoarse, and he pounded on his chest like a doctor might apply electric shock paddles to a man in cardiac arrest.
“If you really want to reject my gift of the [Soul Cannibal], I will not stop you, but I can not sit around and watch as Morgana’s most precious creations are razed like a colony of insects. So I will help you in this… alternative plan of yours. I have been watching your skills closely, and I suspect that if you are able to reach the rank of the Lesser Goddess, or even, potentially, only that of the Excalibur, you might be able to use your [Soul First Aid] ability to repair the chains that have been forcibly intertwined inside of Sera’s box.”
“Really?” Momo said, eyes widening. Ever since Lione suggested something similar, that had been Momo’s naive hope—that she could reverse engineer the thing and break the souls free—but she had no idea if it would really work.
“Yes, really. Sera is a fine engineer, but I believe your love for humanity… Your respect for souls as people, not ammunition, is a rivalrous trait by its own merit.”
“I… okay,” Momo said, hanging onto his every word. “Then that’s what I’ll do. Just tell me how to get there, and I’ll do it.”
The thunder roared loudly again, and the building swayed. Momo could hear a frantic rustling in the hallways. Other government officials were rushing down the stairs, trying to get to lower ground.
“Wonderful. Then I ask of you but one thing—when you kill me, please be quick about it.”
Momo paused. Everything seemed to move in slow motion as she processed the words that had just come out of his mouth.
“What?” she said, voice nearly a whisper.
She took several steps back from Azrael as he flung his arms out and closed his eyes, a wide smile plastered on his face. The silky black hair atop his head began to rush backwards as if wind had captured it; he levitated off the couch, sighing pleasantly.
“I know exactly how much experience this body is worth. It is my last remaining vessel on this continent. It was the body I inhabited when I ascended to godhood. If you kill me, and then two Knights of the Sun, you will breach Excalibur. Of this I am sure.”
As Momo stared at him in disbelief, angry, white boulders of hail pierced through the thin barrier of Nether she had concocted to cover her window. Loud, splintering cracks in the tower’s infrastructure echoed from below. The bedroom began to slope downwards, Momo’s belongings—cabinets, maps, daggers, bracelets—all crashing to the ground and sliding along the floorboards.
“Meeeow,” Dusk whined as she flew from beneath the bed to the west wall of the room.
“Dusk! Get in my backpack,” Momo urged, sliding across the floor so the cat could jump into her open bag. The feline bounded in, and Momo closed it quickly. She could hear terrified screams coming from the building’s inhabitants as the tower yawned and swung. Supernatural lightning had struck it, and struck it hard. Momo could smell the smoke of burning wood wafting up through the vents. Any subsequent attack would likely cause the building to snap in half.
“What are you waiting for? Kill me,” Azreal ordered, floating towards her. His voice had gained a certain urgency, his eyes bugging out of their sockets. “Do it, Momo! Or else the carnage won’t end with this tower. Sera won’t stop until she’s struck me down. And I’m sure we can both agree that she does not need the extra experience.”
“B–but,” Momo stuttered, breathing heavily. “I don’t want to kill you! I don’t want to kill anyone. That’s the whole point of this. I want to save lives—”
“Nonsense, nonsense. Remember the lawn, Momo,” he emphasized, grabbing her by the arms and lifting her up. She yelped. “Sometimes you must sacrifice a dying weed to save the flourishing garden. After all, you are not really killing me. You are destroying nothing but a saggy, half-dead bag of bones. Do not let your fears take you hostage any longer. You want to make me and Valerica proud, yes? Then take your hand.”
He grabbed her wrist, and placed it on his chest.
“And do your very worst,” he said, grinning maniacally.
Blinding light lit up the sky, followed by an apocalyptic boom of thunder that sounded like god herself was clapping. Momo looked out the window, and she swore she saw a face collected in the clouds—one with jagged cheekbones and a fierce scowl. It was surging forward.
Momo squeezed her eyes shut, and Nether flooded through her.
“[Nether Fireball]!”