Demon's Virtue

Eiro was floating within the sea of shadows as he glanced at the crow. He could see their expression, and the way that they glanced down the hallway. If Eiro just kept on playing around like this without actively engaging the crow, they would just run down the hallway and catch up to the others, killing them while Eiro wasn't there. That's what he could gauge from that deep gaze.

With a click of his tongue, Eiro swam around the cave's shadows, dropping from a stalagtite's shadow down onto the crow from above, "What an annoying little brat you are," the Demon pointed out, "Even my eight year olds don't have attention spans as short as you."

With a glance upward, the crow and Eiro locked eyes. Before he knew it, Eiro was faced with the approaching crow, who had jumped up toward him. Eiro flapped his wings lightly. The magic circuits flowing through his wings were formed into an altered version of the 'gust' spell, allowing just the slightest twitch of his wings to shoot him away at incredible speed.

It was fast enough to dodge the crow's jump for, but with that sort of speed, it quickly reached the cave's ceiling and quickly jumped off the, still hot and melting, surface. And of course, even if their evolutions seemed to have focused on its legs and its physical speed that way, they were still a crow. They had wings as well.

As they shot toward Eiro, with their wings, which were attached to their upper body instead of arms, which made them look fairly similar to a harpy, they twisted their jump to align better with Eiro.

Even as the Demon tried dodging out of the way once more, the crow simply twisted their wings and altered their 'flight', quickly reaching Eiro once more. At this point, there wasn't anything that Eiro could really do to avoid it anymore. This was going to hurt, and it was risky. But it was the best way to buy time.

The crow's talons shot toward Eiro's body, piercing into his belly. Their grip tightened and cut through his flesh like butter, as a flood of red blood poured out from Eiro's wound, enveloping the crow's leg before it pulled away. Inside of his body, Eiro's blood had been boiling for a while now.

He did this the moment he jumped out of the shadows at the cave's ceiling, and now that the boiling blood clung to the crow's leg, before it could fling it all away, Eiro flash-froze it around the crow's limb.

This was one of the reasons why Eiro wasn't wearing his dragonscale armor right now. The only thing it would do was restrict Eiro's movements and tactics in a fight against an opponent he physically couldn't keep up with in the first place.

And since Eiro would never be able to directly counter-attack, since the crow could dodge anything he tried anyway, using his blood and flesh were two of the only things he could really do. Even if he had tried to grab onto the crow's leg with his arm, he wouldn't have been fast enough.

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But the crow was already actively touching his blood, and due to the artifact that was fused into his blood vessels, the Bloodstone, he had the ability to not only create massive amounts of blood, but also control it far better.

By simply creating an extreme volume of blood in all his other blood vessels, he was able to push a lot of it out of the path of least resistance; the open wound in his stomach. It was enough to make up for the crow's speed to at least an extent.

Even so, even with a frozen leg, this wouldn't keep the crow distracted for long. They moved away from Eiro to the other side of the cave, starting to hit their leg against the wall to break the ice, and it was able to do so much faster than Eiro was able to repair it. The only thing he was able to do was stretch out the time it was stuck with the ice a little bit.

However, there was something that Eiro was able to do while the crow was distracted for a few moments.

Due to the ice, it didn't notice that Eiro was heating up the room even more. At this point, the light in the room was being refracted by the heat, setting up the preparations for another one of Eiro's tricks. By the time the crow got rid of the ice, Eiro had already been able to analyze its movements and habits a fair amount. Though, they weren't particularly hard to figure out either.

Due to the crow's speed, they never needed to learn any particular tactics. Of course, they seemed to have gotten a bit of basic technique training, but just the bottom of the barrel necessities. As such, the first thing that they always did was head straight for their opponent.

And only in the last instant would they dodge out of the way of any stretched out limbs, weapons, projectiles, or anything of the sort. Like they were wind dodging out of the way of a rounded pillar.

So, what Eiro had to do was fairly simple. He just had to trap that wind.

Before the crow started moving again, or rather, a good bit before it managed to break the ice, Eiro had prepared a flat-palmed strike. He had folded his two left arms back together to increase their combined strength, altering the fireball spell to simply cause an instantaneous outward explosion instead of creating a fireball.

He didn't have the time to completely rewrite the spells hard-wired into his magic circuits right now. At the same time, Eiro's right hand was pushed out out into a particular angle, as he shifted the air and heat in the room in a particular way, refracting the light in an unnatural way to the point it could be seen as something of an illusion. He was able to see himself and the crow from above.

The eye on his right palm was still altered into a kaleidoscope as he started to focus on himself, and in the exact right moment, when the crow was just a few inches away from Eiro's left palm, duplicates of the demon appeared around the crow.

It was really just his upper body and left shoulder and arm, distorted to the point where the duplicates would collapse and melt away in just a second, but it was more than enough time.

The dozens of refracted arms closed in on the crow, exploding outward with a powerful blast of flames that enveloped the monster in Eiro's magical fire. It seemed like even the crow didn't know what to do in this instant, and Eiro, for the first time, managed to land a direct attack on the crow, touching his palm onto their body.

His powerful attack, even if connecting only for an instant, was enough to push the crow's body back as they jumped up out of the explosion of flames.

As Eiro thought, the duplicates melted away, but that was fine. They weren't needed anymore. While the flames were blocking the view, Eiro could sense the crow touching its shoulder, where Eiro had briefly hit it, seemingly shaking. Of course; they weren't used to actually getting hurt, so even a small amount of pain must be shocking.

"I was starting to wonder if you were even real. Guess you-" as Eiro tried to mock the crow, they listened along for a few moments, but before the Demon knew it, the bird monster's talons were less than inches away from Eiro's throat, about to wrap around his whole neck. And the crow had moved faster than before. A lot faster. They were... holding back against Eiro.

Or at least, that's what it seemed like at first, but rather... he was able to notice the minuscule twitching in their leg. This was the drawback of the Three of Pentacles, the Ultimate Agility... that sort of speed would rip your body apart, so you needed the physical strength to support yourself.

If you weren't strong or flexible enough, just the slightest movements at too fats a speed could make your muscles or tendons tear completely. So this speed was still too much for the crow's body. Though, if things worked out for them, that was fine. Eiro would die here, and the crow could rest, being healed and getting praised by the Devil.

However, something was wrong. Despite the air shifting around due to the heat, the crow would never be able to mistake that view. Behind Eiro, in the cave entrance, stood the Devil himself. And that expression... that oh so terrifying expression of pure, unadulterated wrath that spread throughout the Devil's whole body.

"What do you think you're doing?" the Devil spoke, "Stop that right now!"

The crow flinched. They froze up, not sure what to do. They thought they were supposed to kill Eiro? Just what was going on? This was wrong, so wrong, they didn't feel that same pressure as they normally did when commanded by the Devil. The brand placed onto their throat didn't hurt this time either.

That wasn't the Devil, it was a fake, it-

It was too late.

Eiro's stinger penetrated deep into the crow's chest, piercing even their heart. The venom mixed with the crow's blood, and they could feel their whole body giving away almost completely by that intolerable pain.

With a grin on his face, Eiro glanced back at his servant, the one that was created in the Devil's likeness. This was the whole reason for its creation; to mess with the chain of command, and the submissive fear placed into the bodies of the Devil's lessers.