"Teleportation! So this is what Raven can do!"
Outside the school,
Ian did, in the end, get to eat Häagen-Dazs.
Ten of them.
Not one more, not one less.
And being a principled person, he of course remembered to share one with the girl who had helped him earlier.
"Thank you, Rachel. You're a real superhero too."
Ian expressed his thanks sincerely, and after hearing his praise, the girl's expression turned a little complicated.
"A superhero..."
Rachel looked somewhat moved.
Who knew how many hard-to-describe thoughts had risen in her heart just then. Really, she still knew far too little about Ian. She obviously had no idea he said things like that to basically everyone he met.
"The last time I ate something this good was the previous time... those little snacks I traded an evil spirit to my godfather for were this delicious too."
Ian licked his spoon with a look of deep satisfaction.
"Evil spirit? What evil spirit?"
Rachel, who had been sitting across from Ian without any real interest in her ice cream and had instead been staring at him in thought the whole time, was finally drawn in by his words.
Evil spirit and snack.
Those were very obviously not two things that were supposed to go together.
"Some ghostly thing that pushed me around way too much. Looked like a nun, but I guarantee it was definitely not human..."
Ian briefly recounted how he had been tricked and abducted.
The moment she heard that,
Rachel's pupils visibly tightened.
"Like this?"
She dipped a finger into a bit of coffee and sketched a vivid little drawing on the tabletop.
"Yeah. Yeah, that's the one."
Ian admired her drawing skill.
"You've seen it before?"
There was obvious surprise in his voice.
"I read about it in a book."
Rachel stared at Ian for quite a while.
"This is Valak, one of the Seventy-Two Demons of Solomon... what you likely encountered was just one avatar of it in the human world."
The girl looked straight at Ian as she spoke, her tone low and eerie.
"One of the Seventy-Two Demons!?"
Ian froze for a second.
Then his hands started trembling slightly.
Right when Rachel thought he might finally have been scared,
"I knew it!"
The boy smacked his forehead.
"No wonder the little dessert I got for trading it away melted in my mouth! It was insanely nourishing!"
He really had a revelation. No wonder the bull-headed demon had not earned him a reward from his godfather. It turned out the demon had simply been low quality and not fit to be used as premium synthesis material.
"????"
Rachel stared blankly at the suddenly excited Ian. A normal person should not have reacted like that.
Then again, she had already figured out this boy's way of thinking was not exactly normal.
"You still haven't realized what kind of consequences this could have for you?"
Rachel tried to warn him. Beings powerful enough to be called demons were all terrifying, vindictive creatures.
However,
"I have. I have."
Ian nodded vigorously.
"This really is a huge deal for me. Thank you, Rachel, my generous, sharing friend. You've helped me realize that if evil spirits can be traded to my godfather for snacks, then there are at least seventy-two of them in this world!"
There was genuine excitement in his voice.
How could he not be excited?
At least seventy-two?
There were definitely more than that.
If these so-called demons could keep sending avatars out into the world, Ian felt like he might have found the true perpetual-motion machine. In the future, he might never have to worry about his stats not being high enough again.
"No... that's not even remotely what I meant."
Rachel was honestly stunned. She truly could not keep up with Ian's train of thought at all.
Ian, however, did not care.
"I need to learn magic!"
His determination to learn magic had become absolutely firm.
He was not Martin Luther King.
But that did not stop him from having found his true dream in that moment. He wanted to raise a demon lord in captivity so he could sacrifice its avatars every single day.
That was obviously not going to be easy.
But were difficult things not exactly the ones worth doing?
At that moment, the boy had truly found his own American dream.
"You can't learn my magic."
Rachel was trying her best to keep up with Ian's train of thought.
But then,
"I'm not trying to learn your magic. I just want to touch your forehead again when it lights up. Yeah, like that... why does your face suddenly look so annoyed?"
Ian, who was eager to be corrupted by Trigon's magic, did not get his wish. Rachel teleported away, leaving behind nothing but an empty chair.
"What a shame."
Ian sounded disappointed.
Then, in keeping with his traditional belief in not wasting food, he reached over and took the ice cream Rachel had only taken one bite from and stuck it into the plastic box he had been holding against his chest the whole time.
"Open wide."
Ian ignored the bull head's cursing.
He repaid hatred with kindness.
And forcibly fed the demon head some ice cream.
"It doesn't even leak out?"
He observed it for a moment.
And discovered something bizarrely unscientific.
Which led to this thought:
"At last, Mom's broccoli has somewhere to go. I could seriously start a garbage disposal company with you!"
All the disappointment from moments ago vanished instantly, and Ian brightened right back up.
He had realized he now owned a personal trash can.
Now that was real wealth.
"Damned human!"
The bull head roared in panic.
Only to have its mouth stuffed shut by Ian again.
...
When Ian got back to school,
it was exactly what he expected.
Because of Mr. White being blown into so many pieces, the school announced a temporary half-day closure. After stuffing the oranges he had just bought into his pants pockets, Ian hummed cheerfully on his way to the gym he had been thinking about all day.
And by the time Ian and most of the students had already left campus,
"Poor White. He was a good man. Always shared the best little pills with us... I mean, he really didn't deserve to die like that."
Some teachers were still at the school, helping the police investigate with sorrowful expressions.
And this one was genuinely sorrowful.
"Do any of you know whether the deceased had any enemies?"
The police very clearly suspected this had been a long-planned murder, or perhaps some kind of school terror attack orchestrated by a super-powered madman.
"Let me think. Miss Lucy did have a conflict with him before. Not that I'm gossiping, but..."
Some of the staff immediately began using the oldest professional skill in workplace history.
This was clearly their chance to throw someone they disliked under the bus.
And then,
at the school gate, a scruffy man in a trench coat arrived.
"Damn it! I can't get in! My scrying card got casually stolen by Superman not long ago! Superheroes are shameless too!"
Constantine instinctively reached for his pocket, only to find his familiar old companion missing.
His face twisted with irritation.
"I really didn't want to come back! Metropolis and I are fundamentally incompatible!"
He stared toward the campus where he could sense demonic energy and shouted toward the sky like a lunatic.
The next second,
everything around him seemed to slow almost to a stop. Pedestrians, cars, even the faint drizzling rain all seemed to be moving through time at an impossibly sluggish pace.
Whoosh.
The sound of wings flapping appeared.
A white passerby suddenly turned Black.
It was an old acquaintance of Constantine's.
An angel with the proper complexion.
"You must stay here, Constantine. Darkness is rising. If you want to redeem your soul, you need to begin your investigation from the place where it starts to emerge!"
The Black angel spoke in a stern tone.
It was because of its appearance
that the whole world had slowed.
"If darkness is going to rise anywhere, it's going to rise out of Los Angeles. Don't pretend you don't know who's over there!"
Constantine snapped right back at the angel in pure annoyance.
"Lucifer is not the threat. The disaster we have to face is."
The angel's tone grew heavy, and Constantine, whose instincts were always sharp, immediately caught the key detail.
"We?"
He looked at the angel suspiciously.
The angel did not answer.
"Do what you're supposed to do."
That was all it said, repeating the warning.
"Fine. I'll investigate. I'll find out what has all of you high-and-mighty bastards this scared."
Constantine let out a sigh and reluctantly gave in.
His soul was his weak point.
"Good."
The angel nodded.
Constantine spoke again, moving on to conditions.
"But first, you need to make sure Superman doesn't come after me again. He came to Gotham yesterday, grabbed me, and gave me a whole warning speech!"
"That damned thief! He even denied stealing my scrying card! Lying superhero, rotten to the core!"
Even his cursing stayed quiet and cautious.
As if the slowed-down world still did not make him feel remotely safe.
"You don't need to worry about Superman. He'll only teach you that lesson once."
The angel smiled faintly. Constantine was still looking doubtful when the angel abruptly changed direction.
"The child you kidnapped is the real trouble you should be worried about. Poor Constantine. You have a talent for this. You always end up provoking things you absolutely shouldn't."
The angel's golden eyes were full of pity, and that reaction sent a sudden chill through Constantine.
A very bad feeling crawled up his spine.
"What does that mean?"
Constantine quickly pressed for an answer.
"It means something very simple. Before the Lord returns, if that boy catches you, don't mention Heaven, and don't mention me. But you can say you were manipulated by Lucifer."
"Let him go find our king of Hell. I'm sure Lucifer can handle him."
The angel spoke with complete seriousness.
"Huh?"
Before Constantine could even process that,
the angel vanished.
The passerby turned white again, and the whole world snapped back into normal motion.
Even though Constantine was still full of confusion, the angel's choice of words had left him with a deep, creeping sense of dread.
"It was all Charles! He planned the kidnapping on his own! I'm innocent! If I hand Charles over right now, can I still salvage even the tiniest bit of this?"
He shouted at the sky.
No response came.
Only a few passing strangers staring at him like he was crazy.
(End of Chapter)
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