Chapter 69: Egg
[Editor: hue hue hue e,e]
"Are these my wings...?" Noah looked at his back and was clearly very disappointed. He expected large and glorious angel wings, looking at least two meters in span from one end to the other, but seeing these little black wings the size of chicken wings, not even fifty centimeters long, left him very ashamed.
That feeling only got stronger when he looked at the couch and saw Lilith practically squirming trying not to laugh at Noah in front of her. Noah had no idea how he could tell from a snake's facial expressions that she was doing this, but he didn't care and just got even more embarrassed about his own wings.
"Shouldn't they be bigger? More majestic..? What happened?" Noah wondered in a low, discouraged voice. He thought he could fly freely in the skies after he received them, but unfortunately with these wings, he didn't believe he could even glide if he jumped from somewhere high.
Moving his wings, Noah realized that they were like two pairs of arms that he had on his back; everything he thought about doing with them, they just did. It was something completely natural for him, so Noah at least had fun with the feeling of having a couple more members.
Suddenly, a floating window appeared in front of Noah explaining the question he had asked out loud.
[As described in the mission, angels' wings do not develop by just one task given by God. Angels need to complete several tasks so that their wings develop to the point where they can fly.
The wings have always been a synonym for power and authority among angels, since the larger the wings of that angel, the greater his ability to serve God. If the Descendant of Lucifer wants to have large and majestic wings that demonstrate his power and authority, first of all the Descendant must demonstrate that he has the ability to do so by completing the missions that will emerge over time. Good luck.]
Noah looked at the message in disbelief; he had really forgotten that point. The mission had even said that Lucifer's third pair of wings had not fully developed when he was expelled from the sky, so it stands to reason that his own wings wouldn't grow all at once.
historical
Another thing that surprised Noah was how human that message seemed. Before the messages looked like they had been generated by a lifeless machine, but over time, Noah noticed that these messages began to appear more and more with personality, even so much as to wish him luck.
Throwing that thought aside, Noah used the skill that Lucifer developed to hide his wings while looking at himself in the mirror in the room and noticed that when he wished, the wings would come together on his back and turn into a pair of wing tattoos, proportionally representing the size of the wings he had.
He had never cared about body designs like tattoos, but it wasn't something he disliked either. He just didn't care enough to have an opinion on it. Now that he had a pair of wings on his back, Noah liked how well these black tattoos contrasted with his white skin. 'Maybe some more in the future will not look so bad... Nah, the system may be able to take care of that with other tattoos, since, as Lucifer learned to hide his wings by tattoos, maybe he also knew how to hide other things? How to maybe store weapons on the body using tattoos?... That would be incredible!' Once again Noah began to imagine things that could happen in the future as Lilith watched him from afar with interest.
For her, this human was very different from the others. Usually the humans she observed in the store were the opposite of Noah. In front of other people they were much more participatory, excited, outgoing, probably to try to make a good first impression on other people when wearing a mask of sympathy. While Noah was the other way around; instead of trying to appear friendly to others and an insensitive block of gel at home, he was cold to outsiders, showing almost no emotion, but at home, where he felt safe, he opened up much more and looked more like a real person rather than a machine programmed to do a task. She liked this dichotomy about him.
Leaving thoughts of the tattoo aside, Noah returned to the position he was sitting on the floor and did not look at Lilith, still a little ashamed of the wings he had shown to her.
She had realized this, but she just acted as if nothing had happened so that the situation would not be more embarrassing, since even though they had a good connection, it was not yet at the level of being able to mock each other like old friends.
While Noah finished taking the eggs out of his backpack, Lilith crawled slowly across the sofa and climbed up on his shoulder to observe what he would do in the backpack in addition to taking advantage of the contact with Noah's body to heal herself, since in that proximity she felt much more comfortable.
Noah finished taking the eggs out of his backpack and noticed that one of them was a little cracked. At first the thought that passed through him was that he had been careless and destroyed a valuable egg that could be sold for a lot of money, but when Noah saw that no liquid leaked out of the egg, he found it strange. The only explanation he remembered for the eggs not having any liquid inside was when there was a living thing inside the egg and that it had already used that liquid to feed itself.
Thinking about this possibility, Noah raised an eyebrow in surprise and carefully took the egg out of the backpack, and as he imagined, the egg actually had no liquid: no clear, no yolk, there was only a small weight in there, as if a small stone was rolling whenever Noah moved the egg from side to side.
Even more curious, Noah lightly squeezed the eggshell and it broke very fragilely. Inside, looking at Noah with a curious and frightened look, was a small baby bird, its body covered in fur, not even having developed its own feathers yet.
The color of the bird was a deep red, almost like the color of blood. This feature was what most caught attention when looking at this little bird, because unlike the regular Angry Birds that had different colors like bright yellow, bright red, bright blue, the color of the Boss, even if it was random (sometimes being blue, sometimes yellow, and from time to time red), it was always in a very dark tone, which inside the Fortress made it look like the Boss's color was black. Only a few Blessed managed to differentiate the color of the Boss between raids because of the red filter that was always active in place because of the refraction of light by the red leaves.
Just as the little bird looked at Noah with fear and curiosity, Noah showed the same curiosity for the little guy. He did not believe that one of the eggs would hatch while he had carried them in the backpack. He still didn't have the ability to make contracts as he pleased, so Noah didn't know what to do with him. Noah thought that monsters were always born aggressive, because that's what they said on the websites he read about them, but this little red one showed no aggression toward Noah whatsoever.
"Can you feel anything different about him from the other monsters, Lilith?" Noah asked his partner, since she probably had more experience than him in dealing with this, since she had lived for a long time surrounded by these creatures.
Lilith stared at the little bird that curiously looked around trying to understand where he was, observing if he was dangerous, before answering Noah, "This is very strange. I feel nothing different than from other monsters. The only noticeable change is the way he looks at you. He does not look at you as a natural enemy, as monsters normally do when looking at a human for the first time. It's actually more like he doesn't even look at you like a real human; it's like in his eyes you are just a different kind of monster as well..."
Hearing her explanation, Noah was confused. "Maybe it's because I'm not a human being anymore?" He said this as he unconsciously looked at his own back and saw the tattoos that reminded him that he had a pair of wings on his back, a pair of wings that did not come from a Blessing itself made of energy, but wings that grew on his back as if they were really part of him. "Perhaps little by little I am truly becoming like Lucifer?"
Those words really shook Noah. For the first time he had an existential crisis where he started to reflect on what he was, what he wanted to be, and if he really wanted to be a demon in the future.
But that last question was quickly answered, when he remembered Maggy and how well the system and those powers had helped him, and what they could do.
So, with a life now more stabilized and with a defined path, Noah focused on his goals, and in the blink of an eye, more than a week had passed.
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