This is a crosspost from my questionable questing account.
Chapter 3
I smashed shoulder-first through the window of a street level store, with my guitar-axe in hand and not a scratch on my body I swung it down onto the fat demon in front of me that was trying to ward me off with a switchblade. My axe was superior to the tiny knife and the fat demon was split in half from head to balls like a piece of firewood.
After a while of doing this it was remarkable how easy it was to kill these demons. I was barely putting any strength into that swing and I was still able to literally split it in half. I heard some yelling and swearing from the other side of the store and glanced over to see Lute standing over the corpse of another demon with one foot pressing down on its bloody chest while her sword was buried in the face of another.
Lute's mask smirked at me, "Looks like I got two to your one, sir."
I scoffed as we strolled out of the building, "Pssh, the guy I killed was, like, three of them combined."
We flapped our wings and took off into the air to look for more demons. The street we were on was largely barren of activity now. The only reason we even went to the store was because I happened to see one of the demons glance out through the window at us. While we flew through the air I kept an eye out for more demons while also making sure that my girls weren't leaving any weapons behind. So far, it seemed that they were following orders well enough.
Occasionally, I sent out random blasts of holy light at buildings to see if that baited any demons into fleeing into the streets. Sometimes it did and sometimes it did not but it certainly left a lot of ruined buildings in our wake. While Lute and I flew towards a section of the city that wasn't more on fire than it likely was normally I contemplated on what was going on.
Privately, deep down, I had wondered if I'd even be able to actually kill a demon. These demons were supposedly sinners from earth that did evil and wound up in Hell for it, so would I feel some sort of connection with them since I too used to be a human? The answer ended up being no which was a surprise to me. These demons, even the humanoid ones, just looked so utterly inhuman and hellish to me that I felt no more bad about killing them than I did when I played the Doom games. Granted, these demons were a lot more varied in appearance than the ones in Doom but still.
"Sir, more hellspawn in that direction!" Lute shouted, pointing out a group of fleeing demons with her sword that were trying to flee down a street.
Lute and I chased them down and I deigned to not use my awesome laser powers to blast them all at once as I had to be fair to Lute. We caught up swiftly and Lute flew forward to cut their escape off while I shot down behind them from the air. I was like a missle in my descent down with my axe raised. I slammed into the concrete and crushed the first demon with the weight of my axe, creating a decently sized crater in the process and essentially making the demon explode into a gored fountain. It still amazed me how I felt so little of that impact that it didn't faze me in the slightest.
It was like playing a VR game of Doom with amazing graphics and equally amazing control of your character. I grinned and shouted towards Lute, "Rip and Tear, Lute!"
I doubted she got the reference but she roared a battle cry anyway and went to town on the demons. Wasting no time, I followed her lead and started my own swinging. The demons did try to fight back but their basic blades and bullets did nothing to us. It was interesting to note that I could think quickly in times like these and could predict the trajectory of those bullets and the attacks of the demons. This must kinda be what it's like to be in a shonen anime or something.
I was a tad bit careless as it was my first real battle and I felt one of those bullets impact my shoulder and bounce off. It barely moved said shoulder and so I split the offending demon's head like a watermelon in response. It was easy to see how my angels got to be so overconfident that they didn't even think about the possible danger of leaving their weapons behind. Not when fighting these demons seemed to be so one-sided.
It did make me wonder why heaven would be worried about an uprising if we had such a big advantage but then I remembered that there are supposed to be stronger demons than this elsewhere in Hell. What we were doing is basically stopping them from gathering up an army, or something to that effect.
Once we finished the last of the demons in this group we flew off once again to find some more. Off in the distance I could see a bright section of the city glowing purple and, from what I could see since I was so far away, looking a lot nicer than the rest of the city. I paused my flight and stared harder, squinting a bit. In the distance I could see a large tower with what looked like three "V"s all next to each other.
"Sir?" Lute asked.
"Hang on," I told her. "I want to test out my aim."
If whoever built the thing didn't want it to be shot off then they should not have made it such an appealing target. It was just like the eyes that I saw everywhere down in this place, I just had to shoot it down. Seriously, the eyes were creepy and I made it my personal mission to destroy them every chance I got.
I leveled a finger gun at the top of the tower and took aim. My goal was to snipe the annoying sign off the tower and I required careful aim for it. Destroying the tower would be easy but I needed a challenge and practice for more precise uses of my laser power. Once I felt that my aim was good enough I fired a beam of holy light out of my finger and it shot straight towards the tower. I clicked my tongue when I noticed that my aim was slightly off and instead blew off the antenna at the tip of the tower. Adjusting it slightly, I fired a beam once more and this time the sign on the tower was no more.
"All good," I said to Lute. "Hopefully we'll get more target practice for me later."
With that done Lute and I roamed around the city killing demons and, for me, making a mental map of the place and comparing it to what I had learned up in heaven. There was a place called Cannibal Town, which we mostly avoided as the residents are all hellborn though I personally didn't like the thought of a town of literal cannibals existing. But still, we avoided it and only took some time for me to get a good look at it. We did end up scaring the locals before we left which was a little funny.
After that visit we killed demon after demon as we flew in a circle around the city, letting me get a feel for it. As I glanced around I could not help but raise an eyebrow at a weirdly designed hotel sitting off at the very edge of the city and pointed my finger at it. I fired off a beam and turned the sign into scrap much like the other tower across the city, but this time I managed it on my first try. Yay me!
Seriously, it was such an obvious target. Lute was a bit too busy diving up and down to kill more demons to answer any questions about the place.
Still, I wondered what that place was even for. It didn't look like a good place to put a hotel since I didn't see any interesting things to do near it. Putting it out of my mind I refocused on following Lute down to the street, swinging my axe lazily at an odd plant demon and cutting it in half at its stem. I eyed Lute as she mercilessly mowed down demons with mad glee on her mask face and bent down to pick up the plant demon's phone that had dropped from its leafy grip.
It didn't have a lock screen, much to my benefit, so I was able to browse around in it.
"D-Die you fucking angels!" I heard a demon's voice scream from behind me. In response I simply flapped my wings and hovered in the air while I continued to use the phone to search around on Hell's internet. The demon somehow tripped as he missed his attack so I lazily stretched my foot out and pointed it down at the demon, sending a blast of holy light from the tip of my foot and disintegrating the demon under me.
I did the same thing to a bunch of other demons as Lute and I moved down the streets, almost as if I was some Wild West gunslinger dual wielding revolvers.
"From your feet, sir?" Lute asked me with a raised eyebrow as we flew towards the next demon group. She was breathing heavily from all of the excitement as we slaughtered demons left and right all day. Lute was also covered in blood and demon gore now yet her grin never dropped from her masked face.
I shrugged and tucked my new Hell phone away into my robe, "It worked, right?"
Lute made to respond but then the central heaven embassy in the city rang out and we paused. Lute glanced at the embassy and then looked back at me, still breathing heavily, "The extermination is over now, sir. It's time to go back to heaven."
She looked reluctant to leave now but I gave her a thumbs up and we ascended back into the sky towards the still formed portal to heaven. As we did so my quest thing updated and as I focused on it I was met with a screen that listed it as complete yet now it had to process the results.
[Yearly Extermination Quest - Complete!]
Go down and deliver righteous punishment to the sinners in Hell and reduce its overpopulation! On the end of extermination day a performance grade will be awarded and an angelic power increasing token will be given based on the grade of the performance.
Processing Performance: 0%
"Well, I guess that even some almighty quest thing has to consolidate its data?" I pondered. I didn't really care all that much, being perfectly happy to wait and all, though I would not have been able to ponder on it for long anyway. I used my magic to clean Lute and the other angels of the blood covering them from head to toe so that we wouldn't be entering heaven looking like murder victims and creating a scene. Not long after that Lute, still panting and looking a little flushed, stared at me hard before she grabbed me by the neck of my robe and practically dragged me into the air towards my home.
I let out a surprised "mmph!" after Lute had practically dragged me through the air back to the exorcist's headquarters (and my home), ripped both our masks off, and then proceeded to slam her lips into my own. If I had to guess, the extermination battle probably had her blood heat up and her emotions start to run wild after the intense session of demon slaying. Plus, she seemed to have affection for the old Adam and that affection likely passed over to me.
Her face was flushed and her lips were soft even as she tried to shove her tongue down my throat. I didn't exactly fight this even if it all suddenly came out of left field and used my free arms to lift her up to my height and keep her body pressed up against my own.
I could feel Lute trying to pull at my robe as she was now all but crawling on my body like Spider-Man. I was taking this moment to have one hand to cop a feel of her ass through her exorcist uniform and use that as a much better way of keeping her lifted in the air, all the while I snaked my other hand up her body to fondle one of her breasts. Lute made appreciative noises at my ministrations and as she failed to take off my own robe she simply wrapped her legs around my body and threw her arms around my neck while her wings also tried their best to wrap around our bodies in a feathery embrace. I was briefly lamenting on the fact that I was wearing the damn robe right now.
Sadly, our passionate makeout session was not to last as the door to my room burst open and one of my exorcists quickly entered and urgently shouted, "Sir! You need to hear th- holy shit, I fucking knew it!"
Lute growled through our still connected lips and then quickly snapped her head towards the other angel, "You better have a good fucking explanation for interrupting!"
"Tocks never came back to heaven, ma'am, sir!" the other exorcist replied. "She's dead, killed by a demon!"
"What?!" Lute yelled just as my quest prompt finally finished processing its results. Almost as if it were waiting for this exact moment it automatically opened itself and appeared in front of my face. I was glad that I had a stable grip on her rear end as while I was holding Lute up I dropped the hand holding her a few inches down from the shock of the situation until her head no longer blocked my view of the results.
[Yearly Extermination Quest - Complete!]
Go down and deliver righteous punishment to the sinners in Hell and reduce its overpopulation! On the end of extermination day a performance grade will be awarded and an angelic power increasing token will be given based on the grade of the performance.
Performance: C (B)
-Minus one grade for first ever angelic loss.
"What?!" I mirrored Lute's exclamation not long after having read through the prompt I just got almost as quickly as it appeared. I was furious at both the loss of one of my angels and the reduction in the performance grade. I was no perfectionist but this quest was a yearly activity and I wasn't necessarily an entirely patient man when I'm also staring at a timer going down over the course of an entire fucking year. Trying for a better performance grade is going to be a torturously long wait.
In the palm of my right hand, the one not still holding onto Lute's firm ass, I felt something suddenly appear out of nowhere in it. I discreetly opened my hand and looked down at my palm, seeing a small bronze colored token about the size of a US half-dollar coin. On one side was an image of a nondescript angel clasping their hands together while the opposite side looked like rays of light coming from the center of the coin right behind a fat large "C" in the middle of it all. On the top and bottom of each image on each side of the coin were the words "Break me!" written along the rim of the coin's edge.
Now wasn't the time to explore what it would do when I break it so I used my angelic magic to flash it away into a pocket inside of my robe and focused on the others in the room.
"Who, how, and where?!" Lute snarled as she pulled away from my body, my hand now sadly grasping at air, and stormed forward until she got right up into the other angel's face.
The other exorcist saluted, "We have a few approximate locations, ma'am, though due to the outskirts of the Pride Ring being mostly rubble it's hard to pinpoint anything exact. The other exorcists that accompanied her weren't really paying attention to the location either."
"What about the demon that killed her," I interjected, already annoyed at the lack of information gathering as that was just one more thing we had to fix. "Any details?"
"Escaped in their shock. Uh, I think they also said she had really stupid pointy hair and pointed shoes made of angelic steel," the angel replied. Then I saw the eyes of her mask widen, "You really were right about our own weapons being able to kill us, sir! Amazing!"
"Yeah, I'm pretty great," I replied in afterthought as I started to calm down now that I had an acceptable target to direct my wrath towards. I'm glad I snagged that phone from that demon, hopefully I can still use it while up here in heaven else I'd need to head to the heaven embassy.
"Get the scout ship ready," Lute ordered the angel who saluted and hurried off. Then she turned to me, "Sir, we need to do something about this, this… this is unprecedented."
I was just about to reply when the world around us was suddenly enveloped in white and feathers and then we were standing in a futuristic office. The whole ordeal made me jump in surprise until I saw a very tall dark skinned freckled lady with grey flowing feather-looking hair, glowing white pupils in her eyes surrounded by dark blue irises, and an ornate halo that looked like a crown floating above her head. She appeared before us with her hands demurely clasped in front of her.
"Uh, hi?" I lamely stated.
"Adam," the tall lady replied, nodding towards me with her voice carefully neutral.
"Your highness," Lute greeted the woman, putting a fist over her heart for a moment.
I did not recognize the angel in front of me and once again it seemed that someone else knew who I was while I did not know them. It shouldn't honestly surprise me if the Adam before me was actually the biblical Adam, he'd have known a lot of people over the years if he was. Lute's crash course was mostly meant to get me up to speed with the extermination which was the most pressing thing about to happen. I had intended for her to teach me more about heaven at some point before I met a big shot but with this I was forced to go into it blind.
Well, I guess I wasn't completely blind though, I could clearly see that this lady was someone important in heaven. She also had more than one set of wings, three sets of two just like Emily, so this seemed to lend some credit to the thought. I wasn't exactly super into the various Abrahamic mythologies so I don't exactly know how angels were sorted into their respective power levels but I was reasonably confident it boiled down to "have more wings, have higher power level". At least, perhaps, here in this universe. I've only ever met two people with more than one set of wings in total so I can't claim to be an expert.
The tall woman narrowed her eyes and leaned forward to stare into mine. After a minute of uncomfortable staring between us, since I refused to look away, she leaned back looking a little baffled and said to me, "It is true, you really have lost your memories. I don't sense any spark of recognition from you."
She sighed heavily and placed a hand over her breast, "Very well then, I suppose reintroductions are in order. My name is Sera, I am the High Seraphim of Heaven and I oversee and ensure that heaven's order is maintained and kept secure from evil."
"Uh, nice to meet you," I awkwardly replied back. I remembered that Lute mentioned that nobody else but the exorcists and a woman named Sera was to know about the extermination. So, I now knew that this lady was supposed to be my new boss. Good to know.
"Also, isn't the singular supposed to be Seraph? I think heaven either needs a spell checker or a grammar school."
Sera moved over to the window, "After hearing of your accident down in the city I mostly wanted to bring you here to see if you had truly lost your memories. Seeing as that is the case, I instead wish to use this meeting as a reminder to you of your duties in heaven."
I held a hand up, "Ah, don't worry, Lute already told me about the extermination thing. We just got back from kicking demon ass."
"Well, except for the one angel that died."
I held a fist towards Lute despite my inner thoughts and she seemed a bit surprised at first but then was really happy to pound it back. She gave me a little smirk.
Sera almost looked a little disappointed at that and shook her head slightly. Perhaps she wanted to be the one to tell me about the exterminations but forgot the time? Heh, angels really did have it out for demons. I bet she is hiding some serious bloodlust towards demons behind that calm and serene image she is presenting me with. I mean, she's the one authorizing this whole shebang in the first place!
"No, not about… that. Whatever goes on in the exterminations I leave authority to you and your lieutenant so long as you maintain the foundation of heaven and do not invite trouble to its doorstep," Sera replied, briefly holding her hand out towards me as if to ward something away. Well, that solved a question of if I had to get permission to actually do anything about the most certainly deceased angel.
She returned her hands back to their normally clasped position and moved a little closer to me and Lute. I had to crane my neck a bit to see her face, she was ridiculously tall. She continued on, her face and voice still calm and patient, "No, I have brought you here to remind you of your real work as the first man in heaven."
My face must have shown that my mood instantly fell a bit and Sera huffed while rolling her eyes, likely guessing that the idea of working in heaven was horrifying to me. She was correct. But, thinking rationally, doing nothing every day would be equally, if not more, horrifying no matter how glamorous heaven was. Having something to do in the meantime might be good… depending on what it is.
"Well, I suppose even with your memories gone you are still Adam on the inside," she shook her head in apparent exasperation and pinched her nose with one of her long fingers and her thumb. With a deep breath Sera refocused herself and stared at me, "It is nothing so bad. As the first man and human soul in heaven you must simply be present as the representative in the heavenly court of the human souls that have ascended to heaven. You may be asked for your opinion but it is not always strictly needed."
"Oh," I replied. "That doesn't sound too bad. So, am I getting-"
"Yes, Adam, you are getting paid to attend court," Sera cut me off, somehow guessing my question! Smart lady! "So, do you have any further questions?"
"Yeah, can you send us back? We have a small problem that we still need to take care of," I told her.