Demon's Virtue

Eiro covered up Ariella with his wings, trying to ensure that the crow couldn't get to her. Fighting that monster while protecting someone wasn't part of Eiro's plan, and there really wasn't anywhere for her to go right now. And the problem wasn't that Ariella was weak, of course; she wasn't weak at all, but even Eiro wasn't able to physically respond to the crow's movements.

All he could do was use the domain of truth to predict their next actions as best as he could and doing what he needed to.

Right now, the crow was stood still. As though they were watching Eiro. He realized there was a chance.

"Let's take this somewhere else. There's a cave down that way, right? That kind of space is better for you anyway. Let's fight there and get this over with," Eiro suggested, trying his best to convince the monster. It thought for a few moments, and then nodded for naught but an instant, before disappearing without even a single sound.

Eiro pulled his wings away from Ariella, and quickly placed his hand onto her throat, healing the shallow cut.

"You guys head down the other way. I'm hearing some voices, or more like grunts I guess, so there's a blockade of monsters over there. You four can take care of whatever comes your way; it won't be the Devil, anyway. He knows that you use holy energy, so he won't target you directly," Eiro told her, making sure that she was alright after the crow's sudden ambush.

She nodded her head, nervously looking down the direction that the crow had headed toward. She quickly leaned in and gave Eiro a kiss, "Be careful, alright?"

"Of course. If anything's wrong, just yell out for me," Eiro replied, holding Ariella's cheek for a moment. He wanted to stay with her, but he knew he couldn't let the crow wait any longer. Quickly, the Demon flapped his wings and shot away from his lover down the darkness of the mineshaft.

It didn't take him long to reach the cave in question. It was a relatively large open place with a lot of ore reservoires. There were traces of old, long-dried blood down here, but no corpses or even bones. But the walls had weird indents; alcoves that nearly seemed like nests. It looks like there were monsters down here that the miners had dug up, just to be wiped out.

But Eiro couldn't concentrate on that right now.

He stood there in the center of the room. The crow was hiding in one of the far corners of the room behind some sharp stalagmites. Due to the eyes that he had attached to the outside of his dragonscale armor, he was able to see every part of this room without issues.

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Of course, he didn't even need to actually see anything to know where the crow was, but a large amount of his tactics did rely on sight.

Eiro pushed his foot onto the ground, letting earth magic flow all over the cave to take over the walls, quickly fusing it with fire magic. Not only was the room starting to heat up as the rock melted, but light was filling this space from all directions.

However, as the wave of magma flowed over the cave's walls, the crow started to move. Eiro felt the vibrations travel through the ground, but by then it was already too late. The crow had already reached him.

As Eiro placed his eyes on the humanoid monster with its leg stretched out toward him, ready to cut into the demon's body with its sharp, knife-like talons, he filled his body with fire magic from the plane of fire, fusing himself with the magic. The crow's talons cut through Eiro's flesh, but instead just shot straight through a mass of fire.

Due to their speed, the bird monster wasn't able to slow down right away, and Eiro took that momentary opportunity to unfuse from the flames.

Instead, he let the fire magic flow into his upper left arm, where he had, even before entering the tower in the first place, moved around his magic circuits into the shape of a fireball spell that Eiro had highly edited to deeply compress the magic down to the size of a marble.

And then, Eiro glanced at the fireball with all the eyes that were in its line of sight. Because the eye that Eiro had duplicated wasn't his regular eyeball, but the one that had a copy of the mirror of duplication set into it as its lense. Everything that Eiro was placing his eyes upon could be duplicated immediately. And so, with the first eye, Eiro doubled the initial fireball.

Moving it just a few inches to the side. And as he began to blink with that eye, he used the next to duplicate the two fireballs, and then started to blink that eye. And that continued on, until all the eight eyes that had a clear view of the fireballs had done their job the first time, doubling them that many times.

As a wall of 128 fireballs flew straight at the place that the crow stood, Eiro fused his hand with the leftover fire magic that he hadn't used for the spell, explosively shooting it forward. Using the force that the flames were giving his body, Eiro pushed the left side of his body backward to twist himself away.

The crow, having easily dodged past the fireballs, closed the distance to Eiro once more and kicked at him. This wasn't an attack that Eiro could dodge, so he had twisted his body in a way beforehand so that the crow would attack a specific part of his body. Even if they were fast; they weren't particularly intelligent. It was easy to predict their movements and intentions.

Just for the most part, and for most individuals, it didn't even matter if you could perfectly predict them; there was no time to really think about anything. But Eiro, whose speed of thought was able to keep up with the crow's movement easily even if his physical body couldn't, was different. He had already thought things through as far as he possibly could.

The crow's leg latched onto Eiro's arm, digging deep into his flesh and tearing out a large chunk. Masses of blood poured out from the gashing wound, covering the ground in a thin layer, as Eiro used flesh magic to quickly regenerate the wound. While Eiro's demonic body was able to regenerate to a degree, it not only was too slow for this fight, but a wound a this size wouldn't fully recover.

Even with his natural healing capabilities, he would end up with a deep indent in his arm where flesh used to be.

The flesh that the crow had torn off Eiro's arm, involuntarily as the Demon had loosened that part of his body deliberately, began to grow in mass just barely fast enough to stick to its talons. Of course, with just a few flicks of its leg, the crow got rid of the mass, and it wriggled and convulsed on the ground, cut up by the crow's talons.

But it was enough time for Eiro to trigger the fireballs' explosion, just in time for him to extinguish the magma in just a few specific parts of the room. The light created by the massive explosions of Eiro's magic together with the highly curated illumination of the walls created a single perfect shadow.

A pitch black mass of darkness that started from that crow's body, covering Eiro's whole being.

The demon shot his magic into the shadows covering him, taking control over as much as he could, and immediately fusing with it. And this time, before the crow was able to react, Eiro dove into their shadow into a realm of darkness.

Here, he was surrounded by an ocean of darkness, the only way for him to glance at the outside being through the small windows of shadow that Eiro had created all over the cave. It was restricting, but it was enough. Since the demon's body was wholly engulfed in shadow now, he was able to move much closer to the speed at which his magic traveled.

Of course, not truly, but he moved a lot faster than he was able to before.

Eiro swam through the realm of shadows, quickly taking control of the puddle of blood that he allowed out of his body through the crow's attack. Without his say so, there was no way he would lose even a blood of it anymore. He formed it into a spike of congealed, frozen blood, shooting it straight at the crow.

But soon, Eiro reached the next window of opportunity, and on his way, he began to manipulate the eye that he deliberately placed onto the palm of his right hand, the one that wasn't a prosthetic, for this very moment. He fractured the eyes lens, twisting it into a shape that an eye shouldn't take on.

Instead of seeing regular, his sight had become similar to a small trinket that he had seen to be sold at different stands across the capital. He turned that eye's lens into a kaleidoscope, and the things that he saw from there fractured and twisted around themselves.

And as Eiro focused that eye on the spike of frozen blood, branches of duplicates climbed outward to create a net that seemed to surround the crow almost wholly. Behind it, the explosion from the fireballs was still ever-growing, and to its side, the spikes of blood were closing in.

Having no other choice, the crow dodged out of the way into a part of the cave tightly surrounded by stalagmites. And they did so easily, without even being scratched.

Eiro looked out from the sea of shadows with a grin on his face. He wasn't doing any of this to directly injure the crow. Of course, if it so happened to work, he wouldn't forego the opportunity, but what Eiro was doing was buy time. He had another trick up his sleeve, one that was encroaching as fast as it could.

And the moment the trick arrived at the cave, even if for just a moment, the crow would slip up. In a battle like this, that was the most that Eiro could really even ask for.