Chapter 40

~~David~~

“How ... How dare you.”

Jes and David traded glances.

“Uh, what?” he asked.

Moriah pushed herself up onto her elbows. Elbow. She hissed and let her bad arm go limp.

“You fed me demon resonance.”

“Well, I mean, yeah. Laoko said you can’t have human.”

Moriah eyed the tetrad. “I cannot have human.”

“Then you have to have demon, right? Or a fruit, but we don’t have any of those, and—”

“Do you not see what happens to the souls in Hell who eat demon hearts? Do you not see how rabid and violent they become? How bloodthirsty? A hunger for carnage not even their marks can justify.”

“I ... I mean, I’ve seen they get a strong kick out of demon hearts. They get stronger, too. I don’t know, but I don’t know why any of that happens. Doesn’t seem to happen to me at all.”

She set her burning glare on him. “You don’t?”

“No, I don’t.”

The damn woman’s face might as well have been carved out of stone, glare unrelenting and permanent.

“You aren’t human.”

“I’m getting that. Doesn’t change the fact I’m trying to help everyone, and that includes you. Now, if you can’t eat demon heart, what can we do?”

“I can eat demon. But the...” Sighing, she nodded toward Jeskura. “Give it to me.”

“Can you feed yourself?” David asked.

“Of course I can feed myself.”

This woman was a colossal pain in the ass. Of all the angels to come after David, of all the angels he could have saved and try to make peace with, why’d it have to be this girl?

She pushed herself up along the crater until she sat back against a tombstone. No one tried to help her. She held out a hand to Jes, glaring, and Jes put the heart in the girl’s hand. And then yanked it away.

“You are ten times the bitch Acelina is. High and mighty angel can’t even sit up, but has the fucking nerve to be a lippy shit. Lilith fucker.” She dropped the heart in the girl’s hand. It rolled off, landed on the dirt and white stones beside Moriah’s leg, and Jes made no effort to pick it back up.

Moriah glowered, leaned over, bit back what must have been a nasty scream, and picked the heart up. She didn’t look at her. Eyes locked on the rest of them, she bit down a piece of the heart, but something inside broke her gaze. She clenched her eyes, and her legs shivered.

“Vile, sinful resonance.” She glared at the heart in her hand, but bit down another chunk. And another. It was a big heart, probably from a brute. How’d Jes and Caera take down one of those juggernauts?

“Tastes almost as good as human,” Jes said. Lips in a snarl, she squatted down beside Dao and watched the angel. “So what now?”

“Give me a few hours,” Laoko said. “The angel—”

Moriah aimed her shotgun glare at Laoko. “Enough, tetrad. Do not speak like you know us.”

“I know angels better than you wish I did.”

“Explain.”

“No.”

Snarling, Moriah took another bite. The wound in her shoulder partly closed in front of their eyes, burned and split flesh pulling over the slash like a stretched blanket. That was some powerful healing, but the new skin looked thin and frail. Her life wasn’t in danger, and she might be able to use the arm soon, but the girl was still weak. The wing stump closed off with skin and short feathers, but no more than that.

“How long until you can fly?” David asked.

“I ... don’t know.”

“If we feed you more, will you heal faster?”

Moriah aimed her glare back at him, but at least some of the fury in it had died. A bit.

“Perhaps later. Now I need time.”

“Time,” Caera said, “is not a luxury we have. We have to get moving, soon, and—”

“What is this?” Moriah gestured to David with her wing. “You wear clothes? You ... wear the potram rune?”

Much as she was probably looking for a fight, Caera didn’t take the bait. She rolled her eye and sat with David.

“I am,” David said. Caera lay on her side, facing the angel, set her head on his lap, and he slipped his fingers between her bull horns.

“Last I saw of your sister, she...” Sighing, Moriah finished the last bite of her heart. Again, something strange sparked in her eyes, and she clenched them. Whatever it was, it was gone when she looked at him again. “You steal our runes.”

“Hey I didn’t steal shit. I don’t know what the runes are, or what they all mean. But—”

“Don’t,” Jes said. “We don’t need to tell her everything.”

“It’s literally an angel rune, Jes. I think she—”

“No, no. You’re gonna let this bitch go once she’s healed, and it’s better she doesn’t know any more than she does. Or did you plan to tell her every goddamn thing?”

“I’d kinda hoped I could, if we could convince her—”

Jes whip cracked her tail. “You trust way too easily.”

“Indeed,” Acelina said. “If you wish to play diplomat, then play diplomat, boy. Tell her only what benefits us for her to know.”

As much as he hated that idea, playing the sneaky diplomat who only spoke in half truths, the girls had a point. Dumping all his information on Moriah could backfire. He was so damn desperate to get her to believe him, he could feel the impulse to tell her everything in his fingers and tongue, like some sort of compulsion. If everyone could just fucking believe each other, and understand, and—

No. Jes was right. Acelina was right. And much as they weren’t saying it, Caera and Dao were right, too. He was being naïve, and he had to grow up. The angels weren’t perfect, pure beings. They were warriors, and some assholes had sent them to murder him.

Fuck, he hated this.

“Fine,” he said. “Moriah, I’d love to tell you everything. But I won’t.” He gestured around at the girls. “But if I can at least convince you I’m trying to help, that’ll be something, right?”

The angel’s red eyes stared at him, into him, but she looked away and at the girls.

“What do you plan to do with me?”

“What? I said—”

“I mean logistics, unmarked. You journey to the bailiff of this region. Do you really think Timaeus will simply let me be? He will desire my heart, as will all the other demons and Cainites we run into.”

They all looked at Laoko.

“She does make a good point,” Laoko said. “If we can reach Timaeus, I can convince him to keep us protected, but there are many factions in the Grave Valley. Even if we reach Azailia, these groups will lie in wait outside the spire until we depart. Ambushes will become a nightly concern.” The tetrad stood up and tested her wound. Healed over, but she didn’t heal as fast as the angel, the comparatively minor wound pulling some hisses and winces from her.

“I’m not letting her die,” he said. “She comes with us. And if I have to shatter another forest to do it, I will.” He bit into the heart Jes gave him, and ignored the nasty memories that came with the delicious taste. Tingling warmth spread out through his limbs, and the sinking hole in his gut quietened. Even his inner fingers stopped aching so much, far faster than they had in the past.

How many demons had the two girls fought? Did they sneak up on some demons with their betrayers and slit their throats? Or just catch a small group about to eat their meal, kill them, and get two meals for the price of one? He didn’t ask.

They ate in silence for a bit, and David let his eyes settle on the angel. Long, smooth black hair, tan skin, and red eyes. No, not red. Ruby. Something about the way they sparkled insisted ruby was the right word; the first two angels he’d met in Hell had been the same: bronze and obsidian eyes, not brown and black.

She had the body of an athlete, with a narrow waist and moderate breasts that highlighted the large curve of her ass. Much as it was pretty fucked up to notice all that right now, the white silks she wore demanded it. Sexy clothes, with obvious intent to be sexy, same as his. She was just as tall as Jes, too, and just as lean.

The two of them—

Dao elbowed his side, and he snapped his head up out of the gutter.

“Sorry. It was the heart. It’s ... spicy.” Damn aura.

She giggled, rubbed her closest horn against his head, and finished her meal. The Las did, too, chirping and nodding, and with a full belly apparently clouding her judgement, Laara crawled forward on her talons toward the angel.

Moriah waved a wing at the little lady, and Laara skittered back.

“Leave me be, vermin.”

“Laara want to talk with angel.”

“This angel has does not wish to speak with Laara.”

Laara frowned and squatted at the angel’s feet. Wing-striking distance, but she risked it anyway.

“Laara is sorry about ... other angels. Even the mean one, in the mountain.”

David raised a brow. Jes and Caera raised a brow. Acelina and Daoka aimed their eyeless gazes. Laoko looked back long enough to raise a brow before peeking between the tombstones. The other Las approached and squatted behind their friend, four sets of little wings, two sets of talons, two sets of hooves, all girls watching the angel with their big, red eyes.

They could be so damn adorable when they weren’t behaving like swarming piranha.

“A demon, sorry?” Moriah snarled at the creatures and swung her wing at them again. “Ridiculous.”

White feathers put the ladies on their asses, but they didn’t scurry away. Determined, they got back up and resumed their positions. Moriah glared and swung her wing at them again. This time they got on their elbows and knees and covered their heads and horns, like diving to avoid a bomb. Wing past, they got back up and snuck in a little closer.

“Angels scary,” Lasca said.

“But pretty,” Latia said, and she tapped a hoof on the ground. “So pretty.”

All four little ladies stared at the wounded angel with wide, open eyes, and their jaws dropped slightly as they looked her up and down. Demons may have thought humans were the most sexually appealing of the species, but angels were beautiful in an epic, and dare David think it, biblical way. Her white silk toga, not even a toga, wasn’t much more than a few straps of white wrapping her breasts almost like a revealing criss cross halter top, crossing the chest and behind her neck. Her skirt was long on one side and left the entirety of her thigh exposed on the other. Only a thin loin cloth underneath covered her bits.

To top it all off, she wore gold jewelry. A couple gold rings, gold wrist guards, a gold necklace, a gold chain that hung from one hip. Even the straps of her gladiator sandals had gold trimming. There was no gold in Hell. No wonder the Las were enamored.

If it weren’t for her injuries, David’s aura would have flared up. But the injuries — plus the fact she hated him because he’d killed her friends — was a wet blanket on any arousal. Thank god. He was damn horrible, thinking horny thoughts right now. Had to be the heart.

“This way,” Laoko said, and she dipped around a tombstone bigger than any others.

Behind it, a valley swallowed them, a dip in the ground that was smooth walking. Shattered tombstones decorated the ground, but as long as David kept an eye aimed at his feet, walking on them wasn’t much harder than walking on a sidewalk and avoiding the cracks.

“Don’t step on a crack,” he said, “or you’ll fall and break your back.”

“Excuse me?” Acelina said. For a single moment, she paused at the back of the group and aimed her eyeless gaze at the ground. Groaning, she shook her head and followed them. “A ridiculous notion.”

The Las giggled and hopped side to side, throwing their weight from foot to foot or hoof to hoof as they avoided cracks. Dao did too, giggled, and fell in beside David. High spirits. Jes and Laoko walked ahead, and David and Caera with the angel on her back, walked in the center of the group.

“We want to go into a canyon?” Caera asked. “If we’re found out...”

“There’s a church built into a crevice,” Laoko said. “We can sleep there, and then it will be a full day’s march to reach Timaeus.”

The demons whined. Long distances and all that.

Miraculously, they reached the church with no encounters.

“I’m surprised no one’s down here,” David said, and he gestured around. The canyon was easy walking, not super deep, and the walls were soft dirt. “I’m surprised we didn’t run into anyone on the way here, either.”

“The Grave Valley,” Laoko said, and pushed open the large black wood door, “is formed of pockets of activity. Hunting grounds, and the groups that fight over them. There are many places between these pockets where we may hide and sleep, more or less in safety, but finding food is problematic. Each hunting journey means hours of travel, sometimes days.”

The group followed her in. Just like last time, it really did look like some kind of church, except this time, it had no windows. Built into the slope, the stone walls merged with the canyon, and small tombstones outside decorated the ground.

Everyone got back into their usual positions. All in all, not much done today, except for save an angel’s life. An angel who hated him.

Moriah dragged herself off Caera’s back, accepted no help from the Las, and sat in the pew closest to the pulpit.

“Resting in an abomination. This building is an affront.” Sighing, Moriah touched her wound and hissed. Partly skinned over, plenty of it not, David could almost see the bone. “You all travel together and sleep together every night?”

“Not every night,” Jes said, sitting on the short stage and facing the angel. “We’re too busy and tired to fuck that much.”

“I ... meant literal sleep, demon.”

“I know what you meant, bitch. Yes, of course we sleep. The fuck did you think we did?”

“I don’t understand how any demon can sleep, knowing another of their kind sits beside them, ready to devour them the moment they close their eyes.”

Daoka clicked at the angel, stomped up to her, gestured around and at Jes, and clicked some more, with a full-on sneer at that. It was enough to make Moriah pull her head back.

“Exactly,” Jes said, pulled on one of Dao’s back spikes, and sat the girl beside her. “Just because demons can be violent doesn’t mean we always are. And who the fuck are you to talk? I’ve had three encounters with angels in my life so far, two from you, each one violent. At least in my first encounter, they weren’t trying to kill us.”

Moriah raised a brow, but didn’t ask.

“Angels are warriors of God. We are violent because we need to be.”

“Yeah, well, last I checked, God left, right? You said it yourself. A forlorn tower. So how about you fuck off and—”

“I obey the will of the council.”

“Yeah?” Jes flared her wings. “The fuck did they say?”

“The unmarked must die.”

“Why?”

Moriah glared. “The humans have a saying, paraphrased from a poem. It is not theirs to question why.”

“But to do and die?” David said. “That’s a horrible expression!”

“It is the rock angels stand on, the foundation. Faith. Demons would never understand, vermin who scurry and fight tooth and claw for every scrap of food you can find. You kill each other—” She stopped. No one said anything. Silence dragged on, and the angel looked down as she set her hands on her knees.

“Go fuck yourself,” Jes said. “You don’t understand us at all.”

“No one understands anyone,” David said. “That’s kind of what I’m trying to fix. Let’s all just calm down, and—” Every woman looked his way, eyes stabbing, and he put up his hands. “Bad choice of words. I’m just saying, none of us know anything about what Heaven’s like, and I’m getting the impression angels haven’t exactly tried to learn what Hell is like, beyond the surface stuff.”

“Some angels have,” Laoko said. “As you have no doubt surmised, I have known angels before. They sneak down here sometimes, avoiding the judging eyes of their comrades, and experience life down here in the trenches.” Trenches. Laoko had seen a few scrying pools.

“I’ve never seen one,” Caera said. “I mean, other than Galon and Yosepha.”

“Yes, Galon. I have met him before, and some friends of his.” Laoko paced the isle between the pews, twisted a few times, tested her wounded sided, and hissed down at the off-shade of dark red where she’d been cut. “More angels than this one would like to admit come to Hell to experience a different floor of the Great Tower. Everything is not well in Heaven.”

Moriah watched Laoko from the corner of her eye, but her serious expression turned somber, and her eyes fell.

“Is that why you’ve kept me alive? So you can learn of Heaven? I will tell you nothing.”

David sat on Dao’s other side, shaking his head. “I’ll learn anything I can, but if you don’t wanna talk about Heaven, fine.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” Jes said, snarling.

“Fine,” Laoko said, voice smooth, complete with a small grin.

Sighing, David looked to Caera. “Then I guess we just ... sleep again.”

Caera nodded, took watch at the door, as did Acelina, and everyone else cast a second glance at the angel before closing their eyes. This was going to be a long, painful journey. And the fuck was he going to do once she was healed enough to leave? Let her go? That was the plan, but the naïve flag waved in his face every time he thought about it.

But he’d told her that’s what he’d do. That’s what he’d do.

~~Day 55~~

~~Mia~~

They had sex again, last night. Julisa had been right. Damn it.

She enjoyed it. No denying it. No getting around it. She really enjoyed the way the boys all came to her, once they’d found a dry spot to sleep. It gave her a thrill, the way they got all growly and hungry for her, surrounded her, and held her down, and did things to her. If she’d said no with any seriousness, they would have stopped; if they didn’t, Kas and Adron would make them. But it never came to that. She melted into six pairs of hands, and let them fuck her.

Kas and Adron first, because they were her friends and deserved to be taken care of. Then the incubi. Kas and Adron didn’t just watch, though. They rubbed their dicks on her and cum on her while Mia took care of the handsome near-human boys. And again, the incubi all got inside her at the same time, and again, her body had stretched to fit them. Like last time, she’d made sure to ask each demon if they were satisfied, and to her delight, they were.

Romance? Romance could come later.

Yeap, this was pretty much the thing she’d been in denial about. She didn’t really like the mental image of being a slut, but that was old her being an idiot. This was Hell, things were done differently down here, and David was probably doing the same thing! Knowing that dumbass, he was using his aura to seduce every set of tits in a ten-kilometer radius. That gorgala who’d saved the two of them from falling into the canyon had been beautiful, and spicy.

Of course, Vinicius hadn’t joined them. He’d fucked Julisa. And like the night before, he’d fucked her long and hard, to the point Mia had asked her if she was okay, because it looked like she was going to break. She didn’t respond, just laughed between her groans and moans. And when they were done, Vin sat off to the side a bit, and slept. He didn’t seem to care about Julisa, but then again, the incubi didn’t really care about Mia, either, not emotionally. And Adron and Kas, she still wasn’t sure.

But that was last night. It was a new day! A new day of aimlessly wandering a giant underground cavern someone or something had pulled them into. But at least she had tonight to look forward to.

Mia got up, did a little stretch, made sure her flimsy red silk dress was on right, and looked at the boys. They put their armor back on — they’d taken it off for the sex — and checked their weapons. She smiled and squirmed a little, remembering not only what it felt like to have all four incubi fight for space inside her, but the way it’d looked. They were all so classically handsome, and seeing their abs and muscles flex as they moved their cocks in different rhythms—

She slapped her cheeks. Was David this bad? Because this was fucking bad. Surrounded by doom and death and here she was having the best sex of her life and embracing it.

Well, it wasn’t like it wasn’t a fantasy she hadn’t had before. Her, on a journey across a fantasy world with a group of men, her protectors, that she’d satisfy sexually every night. What girl didn’t want to be the center of attention of an orgy of handsome, muscular, deadly men? Just, in that fantasy, she’d been a wizard or elf princess or something, and they’d fuck in inns, or in cute tents near a campfire. Down here in the trenches of Hell, there was considerably more blood and guts than she wanted.

“I wonder,” she said, and she tugged on Adron’s tail as the man finished strapping on his armor bits. “If I can really do things to Hell, maybe I can change it in a big way. Not more firestorms, but make a place that’s softer, cleaner, no remnants, no rocks.”

“No place like that in Hell,” he said. He shifted around, adjusting more of his armor, and his tail pulled at her grip. A big, heavy tail, with some black spikes along its top that worked up to his spine. She squeezed it, and Adron chuckled. With his skin dark red, almost black in some places, it was like squeezing a baseball wrapped in dense leather. Firm. She held on, both hands.

“I figured, that’s why I’d make one.”

“You can make stuff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? I can summon stuff, move stuff, and I think ... maybe ... I don’t know. I just know that, much as all this sex is great, it’d be better having it someplace less gross. Without remnants.” Not that there were many remnants down in the caverns. Most seemed to grow above, in the swamp. “Without blood and guts and stuff.”

“Heaven,” Kas said, and he squatted beside her.

“Heaven? Oh, you mean the actual place. I uh, I don’t think so. That place was beyond beautiful, but that’s not what I’m aiming for. I’d like some place kinda like a spire, maybe? Sure, it had remnants, so we’d have to get rid of those. But otherwise, it was pretty badass in there. The bone furniture was a bit much, but still. I liked the red silk blankets.”

Faust hooked his sword on his armor and joined them. “Maybe when we’ve saved the world, we can visit the Scar. More incubi and succubi than you can count, and plenty of them making silk.”

“That could be fun. Fashion! I never really indulged in fashion much on the surface, not as much as I’d have liked. Maybe—”

“You are all ridiculous,” Julisa said, and she started the march.

The four incubi rolled their eyes and followed. Mia looked back at Vin, but the four-armed goliath avoided eye contact. Sighing, she set a hand on Kas’s shoulder and climbed up on his back. Forward march, it was.

They found another forbidden tree growing on the ceiling a few hours later, and Mia again plucked the strings and made the tree drop its fruit. Everyone ate some, Mia and Vin especially, and resumed the march. For the first time in a while, she wasn’t feeling hungry. She actually felt good, healthy, and her inner fingers didn’t ache at all anymore.

“It’s gotta be because of the remnants,” she said.

“What of them?” Kas asked.

She patted his shoulder. “Grems and imps eat remnants, right? Because they have a tiny bit of resonance still in them. The swamp above us is growing remnants and churning through them with those bone grinder things. All those guts and stuff is ... fertilizer, I guess? For Hell? So it can grow forbidden trees in places that’ll let them, like weeds in the sidewalk. And because demons can’t fly, no one can get to them.”

Kas nodded slowly. With his body forever leaning forward, huge tail behind him counterbalancing him, Mia sitting on his back was easy, almost like riding a horse, and she held onto some of his back spikes like a horse’s reins. It was even easy to keep her egg nice and snug in its shoulder wrap against her belly. And fortunately, she didn’t have balls to crush from riding bareback.

“Is that why we’re down here?” Locutus asked. “Someone or something pulled us down here, to feed us?”

“Or maybe to hide us from the monsters,” Oudoceus said.

“Maybe there’s something down here waiting for us,” Gallius said. “Someone who wanted us fed and wanted to save us from those monsters?”

Hearing demons call things ‘monster’ was weird. She was literally riding a monster. A sexy one, but still, a monster with a flat shark head, no eyes, big bull horns that came out the sides of his head, and a dinosaur body with big arms. But her brain did think of Kas as ‘demon’ instead of ‘monster’, while it thought of those squid-faced, human-ish things as monster, definitely.

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she said. “The monsters, I mean. They started off kinda invisible, right? And got more form to them as we fought.”

Adron nodded. “I’ve seen the scrying pools enough to recognize a squid. They had faces like squids.”

“Yeah, they did. Not at first, though. It was like, as they fought us, they adopted a shape. But the shape they found isn’t ... unique, I guess. It’s a shape a lot of humans have seen before. I mean, maybe not that creepy, but still. It was like ... like someone had wrapped them in human skin, and gave them a squid face, too. All the wrong color though, dark blue, right? Like, dark greens and blues and ... definitely like something that crawled out of the ocean. Like, something that crawled out of the deep, deep ocean.”

“Where are you going with this?” Julisa asked.

“On the surface, humans have this idea of what things might look like if they came from another ... dimension. Like, if there were some alien race, lurking in a dark dimension, waiting to consume Earth or people or whatnot, it’d probably look something like ... those things had.”

The demons stopped and traded looks. Not good looks. The incubi looked concerned, checking with each other before looking down. Adron looked up and stroked a horn. Kas grunted.

“Aliens?” Adron asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, maybe? That’s ... That’d be pretty weird, right? Aliens, in Hell?” She shook her head. “No, I’m thinking ... Well, I mean, maybe aliens, but not like aliens from another planet or something. Something that came to Hell, and it adopted a new shape. If it just showed up looking like a Lovecraft monster, I’d think maybe some kinda eldritch monster, but it didn’t. It showed up without a form, and kinda built one as we were fighting, and...” Shrugging, she rubbed her egg and watched the creature inside shift, shades of black and red barely moving against the dark leather shell. “All I know is, when I saw its eyes, it reminded me of the canyon that tore open under the spire. This ... endless void, but alive.”

She looked back at Vin, but the dragon was looking down. They all were.

“Nothing,” the titan said at last, “ever, in the history of the Great Tower, has ever happened like this.” He shrugged and nodded forward, the weight of his words crushing them all. “So we keep moving.”

The demons grunted, nodded, and pressed on. Even Kas and Adron nodded, as if Vin had just bestowed infinite wisdom. If you didn’t know what to do, what could you do but keep moving until you found an answer?

It was a good thing David wasn’t here. That way of thinking would have driven him insane.

Some more hellbeasts ran past them, but they didn’t look emaciated or hungry, and they went on by. They had to be eating something. Maybe some hellbeasts could scale the cavern wall? Probably. Maybe some could climb a ceiling while hanging upside down? Probably not. They were eating souls, or demons.

Turn around? No, this was, as best they could figure, the counter-clockwise direction they needed to go. If the cavern was slowly turning, they didn’t notice. Best they could do was press on like Vin said, and just hope something came up.

Something came up.

“What the fuck,” Mia said. The incubi grunted agreement.

A pit opened up before them, maybe ten meters deep, a crater that spread out what had to be a kilometer in all directions. Several pillars dotted the crater, thick stone that reached from ceiling to floor; probably the only thing keeping the weight of the swamp above from collapsing the whole cave. Blue fires danced above the pit, lighting the ceiling in far greater number than before. It almost looked like an array of chandeliers of blue candles.

The crater wasn’t empty. Statues. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of statues, black with hints of bronze. Meera metal, and maybe some other stuff from the ground? Whatever they were made of, every one of them was naked, and fighting each other. And every one of them was as big as Vinicius.

“Children of the Old Ones,” Faustinus said, and he stopped at the edge of the crater.

With a heavy growl, Vinicius started down the gentle slope into the strange, wide pit of ancient violence. From the way he walked, he was trying to make himself look bigger, as if the statues were to be challenged.

“I don’t understand,” Mia said. “What’s this about? Why are all these statues fighting? It’s almost like a scene from Pompei, like they were actual demons and got flash frozen in metal.”