Chương 18: Suspected Demon

Two shapes cut through the cloud layer and landed steady on a stretch of overgrown scrubland outside Salem. The ground underfoot still carried the damp of early morning, the city's outline drifting in and out of a thin fog in the distance. Kaelvorn stumbled half a step on landing. Not from any old injury. From a sudden, sharp flare of irritation. He rubbed the space between his eyebrows, eyes moving across the city's skyline, brow tightening the longer he looked.

Batman's intel had only narrowed things down to Salem as a whole. That was a full city, not some isolated compound. Doctor Fate already moved unpredictably and clearly preferred staying out of sight. Finding a magic-side hero who actively wanted to stay hidden, somewhere in all of that, was close to hopeless.

"What, having second thoughts?" Diana landed next to him, a little teasing in her voice. She'd noticed the whole flight over that Kaelvorn had been planning ahead eagerly, and hadn't expected that the most basic problem, actually locating the guy, had somehow never crossed his mind. Kaelvorn glanced at her and didn't bother denying the gap in his planning.

"Didn't think it through, honestly. Just wanted to get here first." He paused, something sly flickering behind his eyes.

"Or, here's an idea. I go into the city center, play supervillain for a bit, flip a few cars, yell some threats. Once people start screaming for help, Doctor Fate's the local guardian, right? He'd have to come check it out."

"Don't you dare." Diana smacked him on the head, some real exasperation in it. She knew he was joking, obviously, but the fact that destruction was even his default joke setup still made her frown. Old Viltrumite instincts really did run deep in this one.

"Fine, joke's over." Kaelvorn rubbed the spot she'd hit, dropped the grin, and let his voice go serious.

"Ms. Prince, I need your help with this." Diana raised an eyebrow, waiting for him to keep going.

"You're an Amazon princess. You've got divine power running through you. There's a decent chance your presence alone could pull Doctor Fate's attention." Kaelvorn laid it out. It was the most reliable option he could think of. Diana thought it over for a moment, then nodded.

"Worth a shot. Doctor Fate's relic shares an origin with actual divine power. It might pick up on my bracelets." She pulled him over to an open stretch near the edge of the city and raised both arms. The pair of worn magical bracelets on her wrists knocked together, letting out a clean, bright ting of a sound. The sound rippled outward, a faint gold light barely visible to the eye rolling out with it like water, spreading deeper into the city.

Wherever the light passed, the magical energy in the air stirred faintly, and even the distant fog thinned out a little. The two of them waited in silence for a while. Right as Kaelvorn was starting to assume the whole plan hadn't worked, a burst of gold light bloomed across the sky. A tower, solid gold from base to tip, rose slowly into view midair, its surface carved with dense, complicated runework, throwing off a sacred sheen under the sun as it hovered and rotated slowly some twenty meters up.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Then a figure flew out from a ripple in the tower's surface, like stepping through water. The man wore a deep blue bodysuit under a golden cape, and the thing that caught the eye first was the seamless, featureless gold helmet covering his entire face, no visible openings anywhere, faint magic glowing at its edges. Doctor Fate. Kaelvorn stared at the smooth, sealed helmet and couldn't help wondering.

Doesn't that get stuffy in there? Right as his mind wandered off on that tangent, Doctor Fate touched down gently in front of both of them. His voice carried through the helmet with an otherworldly, weighted quality, like it was arriving from somewhere outside normal time.

"Daughter of Zeus. Diana Prince. Nabu greets you."

"I'd rather you call me Diana. Or Wonder Woman." Diana's brow creased. She clearly didn't care for the title Daughter of Zeus. Doctor Fate didn't argue the point. The helmet turned toward Kaelvorn instead, and his tone dropped, cold, open hostility in it now with nothing hidden.

"Man-demon. Leave this land." Before the words had even fully landed, he raised a hand, and pale gold magic gathered in front of him, forming something close to a cross. The Ankh of Life. The symbol pulsed with a heavy, suppressive weight, pressing straight at Kaelvorn, carrying the clear implication: leave now, or this turns into something else.

"What do you mean by that?" Diana's expression shifted hard, and she stepped in front of Kaelvorn on reflex, throwing an arm up to block the light.

"Doctor Fate, he's my student. Not some man-demon. Explain yourself. Why are you coming at him like this?"

"Student?" Doctor Fate let out something between a laugh and a sneer, contempt thick in his voice.

"Zeus's princess, and you can't even see what this thing actually is?" He pointed a finger at Kaelvorn, his voice climbing sharply.

"Through Nabu's sight, this boy is wrapped in more restless malice and blood-soaked residue than most demons in the deepest parts of hell. For something to draw Nabu's actual anger the way this does, it would need to have slaughtered at minimum hundreds of millions of sentient lives."

"Hundreds of millions?" Diana's whole body went rigid, her stance in front of Kaelvorn stiffening slightly. She turned to look back at him, disbelief and confusion all over her face. She knew exactly what tier Nabu operated on. A being like that did not lie. But everything she'd seen these past few days had been a kid trying hard to shake off his past and build something decent for himself. How could that possibly be a demon that had wiped out hundreds of millions of thinking lives?

She pulled in a breath, turned her head, and locked her eyes on Kaelvorn, her voice carrying a tremor she couldn't quite hide.

"Kael. Is what he's saying... true?" Kaelvorn didn't say anything. He'd known from the start that his past was never going to stay buried forever. Since arriving on Earth, he'd been honest about coming from Viltrum, honest about how brutal that planet actually was. The one thing he'd left out was exactly how much blood was on his own hands specifically. It wasn't that he didn't want to say it. He couldn't. A scale of killing like this wasn't something you could file under "made mistakes" or "trying to do better."

Every supervillain every hero in the Justice League had ever faced across their entire careers, combined, probably didn't add up to a body count higher than his own. Even counting every interstellar criminal Green Lantern had ever taken down across the whole universe, it still wouldn't come close. He had no defense to offer, because Doctor Fate was telling the truth.

Every civilization Viltrum had ever conquered, every weaker species they'd used as a "trial target," billions upon billions of lives, directly or indirectly, had ended at his hands and the hands of every other Viltrumite warrior who'd done the same thing.

"He was born on Viltrum. A civilization that treats conquest and killing as its whole point of pride." Diana looked at Kaelvorn's silence and already had her answer, but she couldn't stop herself from arguing his case anyway.

"That's not something he chose! He was forced into it! It must have torn him up inside too!"

"Self-deception." Doctor Fate cut her off without mercy.

"If he'd carried even a shred of genuine remorse over what he did, the blood and sin soaked into him wouldn't sit this thick. Through the lens of soul magic, his soul has been drenched in blood for so long there's no possibility of redemption left in it at all." Diana's expression finally settled into something serious. She turned back to Kaelvorn one more time, the last thread of hope still in her eyes, waiting for him to push back. Say anything at all. Even one word, and she'd have chosen to believe him first.

But Kaelvorn just looked at her, and for the first time, real exhaustion filled those eyes that usually carried nothing at all. He let out a quiet breath. That single breath said everything that needed saying. Diana's heart sank. She didn't push further. She turned back to Doctor Fate instead, her voice flat.

"We came here to ask for your help. My student's been targeted by Eris, goddess of discord, and he's ended up with her artifact, the golden apple. We need a way to counter her once she returns."

"Impossible." Doctor Fate didn't even pause to consider it.

"Nabu will never lend aid to a man-demon with this much blood on his hands. Until he's fully out of Salem, I will be watching both of you. Do not attempt to linger here." The gold Ankh flared again, this time kicking up a genuine gust of wind out of nowhere. Kaelvorn stood in the tearing wind, gave Doctor Fate a small nod, his voice level.

"Sorry for the disturbance. I'll go now." With that, he didn't linger a second longer. He turned and lifted off, flying away from Salem. Diana watched his back for a moment, hesitated, then went after him anyway. Midair, after a few seconds of visible internal struggle, she suddenly pushed her speed up, cutting in front of him and blocking his path, her eyes complicated as she looked at him.

"Kael. Tell me. Under what circumstances did you end up needing to kill that many people?"..... +40 advanced chapters on Patreon [email protected] /YATOOO