Chapter 305: Volume 5 - Epilogue
Malzkael Espan Memoria felt forgotten.
She waited a month for Rain and Cassie to get back to her, all for nothing. What good was instant communication when they were just going to disappear on her? They hadn’t even bothered to text except right before a portal down was opened.
Rain had an excuse; he was less tech-savvy than most people from Ayther, though he’d shown a lot of improvement just before he was sent on the titan-hunting expedition. But he wanted to help her find lost members of House Memoria, and surely they had to be kicking around somewhere.
In calmer moments she imagined he might have died, even though he was physically tougher than Cassiel and her combined, physicality meant little on a continent as mana-rich as Diurnus.
In her less charitable moments, she imagined Cassie holding him in a state of perpetual distraction, perhaps kicking things up in Farway, which was the only city permitted on the continent and thus one of the few places angels and the rest of the Myriad interacted with some frequency. Mostly so that angels could run the trade in monster and spirit parts that they had advantages in retrieving, seeing as they thrived better on the mana-rich continent and could fly.
It didn’t help that her work environment had gone from "okay" to absolutely hostile at the drop of a hat. All because she’d made one offhand comment about how Son of Heaven Victoriam should learn his history. She felt like the only angel the only angel not excited about his damn super-weapon, since in her book it would only serve to make Heaven’s rule more distant. Not that Heaven should have to rule anyone - another of her unpopular opinions.
So Malz did what she felt she did best: she found a way to retreat.
Her new paycheck let her buy books at rates that quickly filled her apartment in the Black Tower, but it was the weekend when her teammates tried to convince her to tone down her rhetoric that even the sanctuary of reading didn’t feel like enough.
"We’re just saying that you should be more careful, my angel, otherwise we’ll never get to go to the surface or fight demons," Ed advised. Of her two subordinates, he’d "cleaned up" the most, even going so far as to stop wearing the dark makeup he’d gotten Lute into.
"I don’t care about fighting demons. I want to find my family."
"We know, but-"