arguableyew

The man who trained her to be the warrior that she was had branded a gun at her moments ago, and the devil, riddled with holes, had used his last shreds of magic to transport them away. Emi, prepare yourself, he’d said. She was never prepared for Maou to save her, but in the scant time since their reunion, she’d begun to rely on it, perhaps too much. Or, definitely too much, if the concrete filling her lungs and hardening in her throat at the sight of a dead demon is any indication.

She forces herself to breathe—it’s a shaky, pitiful effort, but she does it anyway. “Get up,” she begs, knowing it’s futile.

Lucifer laughs, and that’s just enough to flip the switch within Emi from devastation to devastated fury. “Hate to break it to ya, but he’s not gonna bounce back like he did in Shinjuku. So, now that he’s out of the way, I suppose I don’t need her anymore.”

With that, he flings Chiho from his grasp like a child tossing aside a toy they’ve grown tired of—head-first toward the pavement. Emi’s legs are moving before she makes the conscious decision. There’s a fleeting thought as she runs, arms outstretched.

It’s her fault Chiho’s here. Hers and Maou’s. But only one of them can make amends for that now.

She snatches Chiho’s limp body from the air, skidding to the asphalt on her knees, shredding her tights and the skin beneath. A scream rips from her throat—layers of pain echoing in the sound.

Lucifer wings higher above the bridge over her head, calling out to Olba to finish their show. Maou would have called his words “B movie worthy,” but Maou’s days of mocking enemies for her are over.

She resorts to pleading with the angel Lucifer once was. “Stop it, Lucifer! Don’t do this! Please!”

It’s as useless as she should’ve known it would be. Instead, she could have used those precious seconds to summon the last of her celestial force and close the distance with Better Half. So what if it didn’t take the first time? She could kill him again.

But she’d squandered her moment, dazed by the physical and emotional pain of the preceding minutes. The purple magic circles arc across the sky in a menacing dance, and she knows that it’s over. She failed. Not much of a hero, in the end.

Lucifer strikes the bridge with the sound of cannon-fire, and the massive concrete structure comes apart above her head. In a final act of defiance, Emi curls her body over Chiho’s…and waits.

But the crush she had been anticipating never comes, and the grinding collapse of the rubble slows to a halt instead. The smoke begins to clear, and she raises wide eyes to the slabs of bridge hovering above her with the threatening promise of an executioner’s axe.

No, Emi was never prepared for Maou to save her, this time most of all.

“That’s a B Movie for ya. Predictable,” comes the drawl of a deep voice she knows all too well. “I guess I owe ya one, Lucifer. Thanks to you, I managed to get my true form back.”

She turns to see Satan in his eight foot tall, heavily muscled form, one horn on his head cut short from a past altercation with her. Emi should be concerned, suspicious, furious even, since he clearly manipulated the emotions of all the humans in the area, including her, to restore his power. Instead, the exclamation that tears out of her is far more revealing than she intends for it to be.

“You’re okay!”

************

4/7 of treacherous fondness on AO3:

"Do not hide behind the lies we tell the Church and claim it's for my sake," Edelgard said, as gently as she could muster, "when you can merely admit to being intimidated by what comes next, instead."

Excerpt from the newest chapter of my 100k+ poly fix-it fic on AO3! Link below: