Demon's Virtue

634 All out

Eiro’s foot twisted out of the way, dodging Shimour’s kick. He retaliated with a sweep of his own, but the Master of Stealth simply jumped over the attack, punching down from above while using the whole weight of his body. But Eiro was able to quickly pull himself out of the way, soon straightening his tail rapidly to stab at Shimour, who had, instead of still going for the punch, diverted to using his momentum and weight to shift himself into another position. Eiro’s stinger just barely missed his face, a few drops of venom actually hitting Shimour’s skin.

He scoffed as he wiped the acidic liquid from his face, leaving behind a deep red spot. For anyone else, that would have already burnt you down all the way to the bone, but Shimour’s resistance was still ridiculous.

Shimour frowned lightly, his grin hidden behind his immense focus. And after a deep breath, it was time for him to really try and stop Eiro from finishing that spell. He pushed his foot into the ground and kicked his other one forward, a few inches away from the demon’s body. But even so, an impact still reached Eiro. It wasn’t like before, where he was trying to fake where exactly he was. Rather, his kick simply had the power and magic behind it to still count as an attack from a foot away.

The corners of Eiro’s mouths slightly twitched while reciting the poems connected to this spell, as he pulled back for a moment. But Shimour immediately closed that distance, and pushed his fist onto the Demon’s chest. Eiro wasn’t able to dodge this time, even if he did know exactly what was about to happen, but he was at least able to block it. Using his two free hands, he caught Shimour’s fist. At that exact moment, he cast a spell to reverse the momentum and force. It didn’t exactly reflect the damage that was done to Eiro, as it still caused his some of his on his non-prosthetic hand to break as if they were sticks, but Shimour received a push-back that nearly completely cancelled out his current momentum.

In this instant, Eiro pushed his prosthetic hand forward into the air, as if he was grabbing something, and soon pulled out an ornately decorated book. As if on its own, it flipped open to a page that was more pages in than this book should have from how thick it was. The Demon pressed his palm onto the page, and grinned broadly, his mouths nearly coming back together in the center of his face.

A wave of light coursed through the Demon’s body as the book that he was holding seemed to start giving off some incredible heat, as if it had been freshly pulled out of a fireplace and was still actively burning. Before Shimour and Eiro’s eyes, the book started to change, its edges becoming just slightly more fixed-up, some of the scratches disappearing while the worn-out leather smoothed out, even if just to a minuscule degree.

“Thanks for giving me a chance to add this spell to my Grimoire. I knew what it did, but I had never actually used it before,” Eiro explained, his two mouths slowly coming together into one again. Shimour looked at the Demon with a slight groan, seeing the deep gashes practically carved into Eiro’s skin. His armor covered most of his body, so he was actually only able to see the parts covering his neck and face, but he knew that he was covered in those things from head to toe. Even his horns had those carvings on them right now. Every one of these grooves was filled with low flames, as if you were looking at cracked open volcanic terrain.

However, Eiro soon made a somewhat annoyed expression, “Alright, well... maybe we should finish this fight quickly, this spell is actively sapping my Life Force.”

“...It’s what?” Shimour asked with a frown, and Eiro quickly replied, “Yeah... as I said, this is a somewhat weird spell, it’s in the Ancient Language, but it’s also not really? Like some super weird dialect, or maybe it’s a language based off of the Ancient Language, or something like that. Whatever it is, I wasn’t able to fully translate it yet... and it looks as though a component of the spell makes it so that the ‘Fire’ is kept burning using one’s own ‘Life Force’ as fuel, so... Let’s finish this?”

.....

“You really are ridiculous... yeah, let’s finish this,” Shimour replied with a frown, as he pushed himself forward for the next attack, but before he knew it, Eiro had already closed the distance between them. Eiro swung his fist at the Master, quickly hitting a punch in his side. By the sheer force of the attack, Shimour was thrown to the side, but before he could, Eiro had already grabbed Shimour’s arm and swung him down at the ground like a hammer.

Shimour’s giant body slammed into the training ground’s floor and a wave of cracks shot outward. Eiro quickly stabbed one of his daggers down toward the mountainous man, but his dagger simply passed through his body. Quickly, the cracks formed from Shimour’s impact were filled with the flames of Eiro’s dagger, as the Demon tried to figure out what exactly just happened. He turned around with a shiver and looked at the man in front of him. The air around him had changed to a ridiculous degree, as if he wasn’t even looking at the same being as before. It was as if his body was blending into the space around him, but was still there sticking out like a sore thumb. Strands of his body pulled away from him as if he was made of smoke.

Instantly, despite his body being strengthened beyond belief, while looking at the current Shimour, he could feel nothing but a sense of inferiority. It was as if he was looking at the Monster King again. If Eiro still had a heart, it would have jumped out of his chest by now, as fear clouded his mind for a moment.

Instinctively, he pulled back a bit, as Shimour spoke, “I’m incredibly sorry, but as you say, we should finish this quickly so that you can stop that ridiculous spell from killing you.”

“You’re sorry that you’re trying to stop me from dying?” Eiro scoffed nervously, but Shimour shook his head, “No, I’m sorry for holding back so much until now. Though, now that it’s come to this... it’s absolutely my loss. And since I’m a sore loser, I’ve got to take out my anger a little.”

Eiro didn’t even know what to say, nor did he have the chance to try and say anything at all, because before he knew it, Shimour’s hand was approaching Eiro’s chest. He knew that it was coming, he knew what he was supposed to do to stop it, but he simply wasn’t able to do so. As if he was stuck with time being slowed around him again, only his mind was able to keep up, but his body was still too slow.

As if it were made of paper, Shimour bent the dragon-scale armor that Eiro was wearing and hit him with a single impact straight onto the solar plexus. He was thrown back in an instant with a ridiculous amount of force, the only thing he was able to do was push himself down with a combination of gravity and air magic, before strengthening the dirt underneath him to properly catch him, so that he wouldn’t destroy the whole gardens with his body being flung through them.

Luckily, Eiro was still being strengthened by that ridiculous spell, so he came out with little damage from this overall, but it was clear that the attack still wasn’t over. Before Eiro could recover himself, Shimour was already there to take pull the demon away. He tightly grabbed his tail and swung him high into the air. As though he was already there before even letting go, Shimour was ready to punch Eiro down into the ground, right into the center of those fiery cracks. A wave of hot air, flames and rocks was thrown throughout the gardens. James and Krog did their best to hide from the impact, but even they didn’t come out unscathed.

Eiro knelt there, in the crater, his mind a mess. And it wasn’t only his own; the two duplicates in the planes of fire and water were shocked too, they didn’t know what was going on. It was as if they were filled with the same fear that the original Eiro was, even just through the simple sense of sight.

He was filled with the instinct to flee, to at least get to a place where he could recover, but before he could, he felt dozens, if not hundreds, of knives stabbing into his body from wherever they could, over and over again. While he didn’t know whether they were real knives or not, since the fact that regular metal could break through dragon scales simply didn’t makes sense, it was a fact that this was a ridiculous, overwhelming pain. A pain that he didn’t expect or really knew what to do with anymore. Eiro looked up at the sky as he fell to his back. He could feel the flames from the spell continuing to feed off his life force, so he quickly cancelled the spell and repaired his body with some quick healing magic, but he was still feeling too exhausted to move. So instead, he looked inward, to figure out what exactly just happened.