Back in the shelter, Lucas was more than willing to head straight back to the old capital, but he couldn't. His energy was mostly recovered, but he had to figure something out before leaving.
"I'm here to drop them off, correct. I need to find a friend. I know he's still alive. But I'll stay here for some time until I finish up a project of mine."
Elianor saw the dedication in his eyes, the longing to see him again, and fully understood it in an instant. She might not like the human marching into her space, but his determination and protectiveness of another made her bend her will.
"Then I wish you the best of luck. I'll prepare a place for you for you to stay. In return, I request that you aid us in driving back any angels that might find this place."
The human looked at her eyes for a moment to find the same kind of determination and revealed a light smile, "So be it. I assume you have some security measures that alert you when someone gets close? Inform me if you need my help."
And with that, Lucas was led to his place for the time being. Elianor had a lot of extra work on her plate with all the newcomers. Luckily, the influx of people also brought many capable hands with them, making it easier to distribute the tasks.
Seeing the demons obey her so readily and without objections felt strange for some reason. If she was working with her previous Guardians and friends, she would understand the willingness, but now, it felt off.
As the days slowly started to move forward, she eventually approached one of the Rank 3 demons that served as a temporary guard of the underground city.
"Excuse me, Loid? How are things?"
Nodding to her slightly, the man gave her the impression he had everything under control. "Not much to say, Duke Elianor. The people don't have the time to be angry at each other. They're all working hard to survive. I've put the capable men at work to expand the space and build the houses while the others are working in the fields or creating clothing."
"Then I can assume things are reasonably going well?"
"Despite what happened? It's a miracle we even got this far," he didn't look happy. The battle he barely survived led him here, where he simply hoped not to be found. There was no joy in such a realization. And yet, all of this was possible due to the dedication of a single man who had a simple wish.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Why were you all so willing to obey my orders? I understand that I'm a Duke, but I'm not the one that ruled over you. Besides that, we're on the same Rank."
Elianor knew her words could backfire or cause a revolt in a sense, but her gut told her he wouldn't do such a thing. They were all obedient and loyal for a reason she couldn't figure out.
"Boss told us to follow you, so we do."
"Boss? You mean that human?"
"Don't be deceived by appearance, miss. That man is a more accurate description of the ancient demons than we are."
Elianor frowned, she lived with Duke Arbor, a man who saw the beauty in all things and believed that strength shouldn't be the driving force. Making up rumors and legends about a person just because they're strong frustrated him, since it made the general populace scared of him despite his normally friendly nature.
"Please don't exaggerate. He's strong, I can understand that, but there are many like him," holding up her palm to stop him, she didn't want any useless information about the man. Loid just started to laugh, "Hahaha, may the angels gut me if I'm lying. You just didn't see him in action, or you wouldn't have even thought of minimizing his accomplishments," calming down from his light laugh, he had a strange look in his eyes as he continued.
"He's not exactly thrilled to lead us, you see. His anger was all the more clear when he slaughtered three platoons of angels by himself. He looked like he was toying with their lives," looking at his own open palm, he clenched it tight. "I thought I was powerful, but I've been put in my place by a mage much younger than me. He's our savior and leader. He made sure to kill any who stood in our way and healed anyone that was hurt during our travels. He has my respect."
"Even if he's a human?", Elianor had only seen humans as slaves in the past, worthless pieces of skin and meat capable of doing the most basic of chores.
"Time to put that in the past miss Elianor. All those angels are humans as well. Looking down on them will only end badly."
She didn't understand. For demons that have lived for hundreds of years under the same system where strength dictated all, they suddenly became so emotional. To blindly follow a random human that was of the same race that slaughtered most of them, that were after the life of her beloved. She hated it.
Walking over to the house she set apart for Lucas, she found a few demons standing guard for no apparent reason, since the man inside the large cube that tried to deceive people into believing it was a house was the strongest one in the city.
Entering the room, she found that all the separate rooms and spaces were gone, removed from existence to make it quite literally a big hollow cube. The moment she entered the room, she felt like she walked into a different atmosphere. The stench of death and rot reached her nose in an instant.
Covering her nose with a cloth, the human in front of her was sitting with his back to her. Lifting his back slightly and turning his head, he looked at her, who was trying to escape the scent.
"If you don't like it, you can stand outside. I put an air barrier to prevent the smell from leaking."
Looking back to what he was doing, he seemed to ignore the woman that arrived at his doorstep. She wasn't often so fully dismissed like a passerby. Braving the horrid stench, she stepped towards him. In the corners of the room, dozens of bodies were piled up. Each still had their wings and shiny armor, something that pissed her off, but seeing their almost terrified expressions in death, she couldn't help but feel something else as well.
"What are you doing?"
Standing over him, Lucas ignored her for as long as he could before giving her a mean side eye. "Do you always snoop on another mage's experiments so blatantly? If I wasn't in such a hurry, I would charge you the moment you stepped inside this place."
The annoyed tone Lucas spoke with infuriated Elianor as well, "Then you should at least invite me or greet me properly. Besides, perhaps I can help you out and you can leave earlier," something both wanted.
Lucas almost chuckled, "You're the first one to speak some sense. I also want to leave as soon as possible. But I won't get through the capital without this," presenting his workbench, the ground, it was covered in loose pieces of armor from the angels.
"You want armor? I can ask for-"
"At least look before you speak. Do you even know what this armor is capable off?"
Elianor was a specialist in magic related to nature and earth, not metallurgy. The pieces looked like they were a part of a basic set. She could sense mana was infused into the individual plates, but not what that mana was meant to do. Her pensive look made Lucas reveal his card.
"Then follow the same path of logic I had. There were hundreds of thousands of soldiers in those streams, there had to be millions of angels flooding the world. How do you create identical armor for each one despite not knowing their body proportions?"
Elianor didn't know where the sudden question came from, but she never stopped to think about the logistics behind their preparations. There were million of mages that needed to be prepared, and making everything on the spot would be impossible.
"Don't they just make a few standard sizes and base it off of that?"
She could almost feel the eyeroll Lucas gave her as he stood up from his place. She badly wanted to comment on his behavior, but her natural curiosity as a mage started to slowly take over. As Lucas picked a random corpse, he ripped the armor covering the arm off and threw it to her.
Catching it, she instantly regretted as blood spattered her clothes. "You-!"
"Put it on."
"It's too big for me. You should've picked that one," pointing to a slender female among the bodies, Lucas only shook his head. "Put it on."
Seeing his annoyance at her hesitation, she felt like walking out of the room. She just didn't understand why anyone would be willing to follow such a crude man.
Placing her arm into the armor, it felt wet, making her grimace before opening her eyes wide as the armor glowed slightly and adjusted it's size to fit her arm perfectly.
"What the?"
"You've been battling against these angels, but you don't know them in the slightest. How do you suppose you'll survive against an enemy you don't know and understand?"
Hearing such a comment from a man as brazen as him truly infuriated her, since her beloved spend most of his life dedicated to holding back the invasion as much as possible. To hear him almost besmirch his name didn't sit right with her.
"We weren't exactly in a position to be spying on their inner way of working. We could only prepare so much."
"Hmm? I'm not talking about the Duke, or I guess all Dukes, taking part in the preparations for this war, I'm talking about now. Days have passed, yet you didn't even know how they communicated with each other, their overall strength and their armor. I'm saying you're treating these days as another day survived. You're not preparing for a fight, you're hiding away, hoping nobody finds you while I'm preparing to back out there, there's a clear difference" Lucas didn't seem to hold back his critiques.
Elianor didn't know what to think of the man. He kept spewing insults and didn't seem to have the capacity to be nice. But for Lucas, there was just no point in being kind here. To him, they would survive a few more weeks before the angels stormed the place and slaughtered everyone inside.
He didn't care, he wouldn't mind seeing none of them again. For Asta, or one of his close associates, weren't here. He didn't have any friends or acquaintances here, nobody mattered. It was very simple to Lucas, not that Elianor could tell.
"What's the point in knowing how their armor worked? Sure, we could try to wear them ourselves, but if you haven't noticed, we have horns. Those helmets won't fit."
"And it seems the point of my research has flown over your head again. Why would I need to research their armor if that would be my goal? Why am I not finished?"
Walking back to his original spot, he dragged a body with him. Sitting crosslegged, he placed the body in front of him. The armor was covered in trails of blood, but otherwise in pristine condition. Only the head was completely crushed.
"Just watch."
Placing his hand on the chest of the armor. He closed his eyes as he let magic flow through his arm into the armor. Taking his hand back, nothing looked out of the ordinary. Snapping his fingers once, the armor suddenly shook heavily as it compressed to an weird degree, pressing the contents closer and closer to each other.
Blood started to ooze between the gaps, the sound of bones cracking and something popping sounded not long after. Guts flowed through the sides, covering the floor and his legs in an instant.
All the armor had shrunk immensely, turning the poor body within into a meat paste as the pieces almost tried to combine. Elianor stepped back to avoid staining her shoes with the bloody pool that seemed to keep expanding.
"What the hell? What did you just do?"
"Are your eyes for decoration? Well, considering the amount of make-up, I suppose you do see it as a part of your looks," standing up, he drew a small row of runes next to each other in light.
"Learn this sequence. It activates the armor to reshape until it fits the user. The armor activates it when a mass of mana enters it. Then it shrinks until it reaches the source mana of mana, keeping a distance of a nail or two. Then it stops."
Seeing the runes before her, she had never seen a single one of them. They were all foreign. Despite her knowledge and standing as the previous Duke's lover, she never had seen such runes. Studying them as fast as she could, she would make sure to never forget them after seeing the potential in them.
"How?", she felt flabbergasted. They weren't on friendly terms, clearly hostile to one another, yet not only did he give her something extremely valuable, he seemed to care little about what he did. He was more annoyed with her unfinished question.
"How, in the sense of how I got the runes or how I bypassed the restrictions?", his frustrated look almost pulled Elianor out of her fascination of the runes. She almost forgot that he was standing next to a meat patty of a human corpse.
"I'm curious about both."
"How I've gotten them matters little. What matters is how to put it in practical use. The armor is meant to shrink towards a surface of mana, and since every mage has mana in their blood, willingly or not, it always stops at the right time. So the only thing we need to do is raise the armor's tolerance for mana, make it search for a higher density of mana."
Hearing the explanation, something snapped in place for Elianor to connect the dots. "The core?"
"Correct. The only problem I have with it, is the application. I need to touch the armor to change the general rules. I need to write it on the armor pieces."
Lucas stared at the body beneath him. Looking for any possible way to make some kind of change to his methods or spell to activate it from a distance, yet he found nothing. If he was some kind of array genius like Asta, he might've had some ideas, but he had nothing.
Elianor stared at the runes for a little longer before grasping her forehead. "I...," she almost didn't want to admit it, "I think I might have a possible solution."
Lucas turned to her, a strange look in his eyes. She couldn't tell whether it was doubt or curiosity. "How?"
"How did I figure out a way to help you or how could I help you?", feeling her smile widen from her snarky comment, she felt fulfilled in a strange way. Seeing him pinch the bridge of his nose made her feel like she won something.
"The first. What did you come up with?"
"Pollen," crossing her arms and smiling widely, she felt like she finally got one over him. The proud look on her face only motivated Lucas to figure things out without her help, but he had no experience with the combination from plants and magic. Not that it stopped him from speculating.
"You would arrange the pollen to form the runes and use the magic contained within to activate the spell?"
Elianor almost froze in place, but held her smile wide, "Close. If we simply use the energy inside the pollen to activate the spell, we would have to direct millions upon millions of tiny pollen to behave a certain way. It's impossible to do so."
Lucas crossed his arms. He had some experience multitasking, but dividing his mind into a million pieces to arrange the pollen to form runes didn't seem logical or possible. "Then how?", Lucas felt the regret the moment his words were voiced out.
The large smirk on Elianor's face would haunt him if she pushed it any further, "All plants are alive."
It took a moment, but Lucas nodded, "Yes. Even a blade of grass has some willpower, but not much," thinking back on his experiments when he was still quite young, he discovered a simple fact quite quickly. What he wasn't aware off was the fact of how important of a difference having willpower meant.
"How do you know that?", even Elianor was surprised to see a human with no affinity for plant magic to have figured out something like that. Especially since she didn't even mention willpower.
"I don't see how that matters."
"Well... Yes, all matter of plants have willpower. Then you'll also know that older plants and plants that grow in a mana rich environment can produce cores of their own."
Hearing that, Lucas eyes were almost transfixed onto her. His cold, detached, stare, pierced through any defense she might put up. She felt like the air got heavy as hundreds of theories, questions, and possible experiments started to go haywire in his head.
Elianor felt awkward, and decided to move on, "Uhm, the pollen also contain willpower, but very small. It'll be just enough to form certain patters and combinations if we overwrite it. It'll take some time, but I can make it take the shape of these runes."
Lucas shook his head as he grasped it, "Of course."
She didn't know to who or about what he said it, but the almost self demeaning look he had in his eyes made her confused.
"Then we'll do that. I... I'm very interested, but I don't have the time to study an entire new field of magic. I need to go to the capital as fast as I can. How quickly can you prepare this?"
"Give me a few uninterrupted days, and I'll have prepared enough polled to cover a few thousand people. Since I'll only need to form the runes on the pieces of armor, it shouldn't take too long."
"Deal. I'll take care of everything in the city, you focus on this task."
Stepping towards the doors of his little cube, a layer of darkness washed over him, removing every single spot and stain of blood while cleaning the stench of death around him. Watching on in amazement, the expertise over his spells was higher than her own.
Left behind, Elianor didn't know what to think of the man. He was cunning, clearly powerful from the stories and had a strange determination that wouldn't let anyone else stop him. The way he handled and spoke made Elianor almost act as if she was his butler, simply following commands.
"I just wanted him gone. Now I'm stuck working with him? What just happened here?"
They would serve each other's purpose in a sense. She learned how to easily defeat the angels and if their plan would work out, all attention would be drawn to the capital, keeping them safe.
He was annoying, rude, selfish and arrogant, but Elianor had to admit she started to understand why the other demons followed him so blindly. The confidence he displayed wasn't something she saw often.