Demon's Virtue
chapter-202

Eiro used magic to get rid of all the snow in the area that Eiro and the puppet would be fighting in, and then took up his stance and looked at the puppet right in front of him. He knew exactly what kinds of moves it had, but they would be faster and more complex than what Eiro was used to so far, considering that its physical capabilities seemed to have risen together with Eiro's own.

For now, he would just try and fight it with only the Hand-to-Hand combat token. He still needed to be able to properly 'beat' the puppet while it had just one token in it before moving onto trying to do it while it was making use of two of them.

With a deep breath, Eiro nodded his head, "Let's start." He said. The next moment, the puppet started to move. It didn't jump toward Eiro or anything, but it simply started walking sideways while keeping up its stance properly, as if trying to circle around the Demon.

It did this a lot, when it knew that Eiro wouldn't attack right away. The Demon slowly listened to the puppet's footsteps, the close to silent sound of its wooden joints rubbing across its limbs. And that was just when Eiro managed to figure out when the puppet would attack, because its whole body would tense up before it did. It was always this way.

Eiro twisted his body around all the whilst preparing a counter-attack. Due to the rapid movements, rippled were created all over Eiro's body, and the demon was trying his best to make it so that they would all be focused onto his arm.

He pressed his palm onto the puppet's arm and tried to wrap h is fingers around it. It seemed like due to the extra force created by the movement of the water 'in' or 'on' Eiro's body really did manage to create effects that usually wouldn't be possible. There was a bit of extra force there, with a nearly unpredictable pattern to it, and so even the puppet was slightly put off.

But just a slight bit, as it soon reacted by grabbing Eiro's arm with its own and then wrapped its legs around it as well. All it weight was now on Eiro's arm. The arm that was actually heavily weakened after being infused with the 'essence of water'. Eiro was able to move in quite agile ways, but his basic physical strength seemed to have gone down a fair bit.

The puppet pulled on Eiro's arm and artificially created ripples in his body that would then end up affecting the Demon's grip on its arm. And the moment that it loosened up, the puppet simply let go of Eiro's arm all at once and dropped onto the ground.

It caught its fall with its arms, but instead of resetting its stance right now, it just pressed itself off the ground again to press its feet, which were still higher than the puppet's center of gravity, and kicked Eiro into the chest.

But luckily, while Eiro miscalculated how well this would all work now that his body had changed like this, the puppet seemed to have done so as well. Instead of making it possible for it to easily kick off of Eiro's usually rather hard torso while pushing him back, Eiro's body absorbed a lot of the force and slowed the puppet's body down considerably without affecting him too much.

Eiro tried to move the ripples caused by this kick to both his arms and grabbed the puppet's legs. Using the extra force created by the ripples traveling through his body, Eiro pressed the puppet's left leg down and its right leg up to twist its whole body into a screw-motion.

Of course, the puppet tried its best to then just kick Eiro into his face by using this motion, but as he anticipated this, he had already been falling back and rather naturally kicked the puppet's body as it was still suspended in air. But obviously, much like the puppet's kick was weakened by his body absorbing the shock, his own kick was also weaked. It did its job to an extent, however, and the puppet was interrupted as it was trying to catch itself.

Meanwhile, as Eiro was fighting the puppet, the others were looking at this fight with awe. All of this happened within just a few seconds, and they weren't even able to properly keep up. For different reasons, of course. Jess was able to process the actions quickly, but her dynamic vision wasn't good enough really see every bit of the movement that Eiro and the puppet were going for. Krog and James, on the other hand, had pretty good dynamic vision, but weren't able to process what waas happening that quickly from a viewer's position and were just staring at everything with a blank mind.

"It's pretty crazy, huh?" Arc asked with a bit of a laugh, "The worst thing is that this might either take a minute, or an hour. And we have literally no way to tell which it's going to be."

"Can..." Jess started, "Can you really follow what they're doing?" She asked. Arc's stats were pretty low, so she somewhat doubted it, but she was really surprised when Arc just shrugged.

"Kinda. My class' ability lets me focus super hard on specific things while fading everything else out. So if I focus on observing them, I can somewhat follow. But really, right now I can't at all." Arc laughed loudly, turning back toward Eiro and the puppet. And to his surprise, they already finished. But not because either side lost, but because Eiro just interrupted the training.

"This is way too bothersome..." The Demon sighed, taking a few deep breaths after this, and the others looked at Eiro curiously, "Why? Wasn't it a good fight?" James asked, and Eiro immediately shook his head.

"Not at all, actually. I was able to handle myself somewhat, but I would have lost pretty soon. I need to play around with this technique a bit more for now. See if I can fix some things up." Eiro looked at his hand with an annoyed sigh, although he was quickly reminded of a whole other fact, "You know that the onle element you really tried to do anything with properly was water, right? Just go for your others now." Nelli pointed out, and Eiro slightly grumbled as he looked over toward her.

"Right." The Demon replied, and Nelli just smirked at him, "Heh, don't tell me that Eiro the great scholar with the perfect memory forgot something like that?"

"Evolutions mess with me, alright? My body is aching all over, I'm dizzy, and the system probably isn't working properly either. I mean, I can't even open my status. So cut me some slack here, alright?" Eiro grumbled, although Nelli simply kept smirking, "Of course, of course~!"

Eiro took a deep breath and then first things first, started trying to freeze the water magic inside of his body. The change between those two types of magic was constant and rather smooth for the most part, so Eiro was sure that this would work without an issue.

And soon enough, Eiro's body hardened all over again.

Eiro wasn't entirely sure what he could use this for, though. He was far slower than usual, it was like when he used to sit out in the snow during winter all day, and his body was effected by it then.

"Did it work?" Jess asked curiously, and slowly touched Eiro's arm, before quickly pulling back because she didn't expect him to really be that freezing cold.

"Hm..." Eiro muttered, before turning toward Arc, "Melt some of this snow for me." The Demon suggested, as Arc currently had his katana cloaked in a layer of flames, and just held it down for a moment. Eiro quickly took control of it and moved it toward his hand. And really, like he expected, the water froze immediately the moment he made skin contact with it.

"I guess that's somewhat useful in fights, but I don't need it on my whole body. Maybe my palms and feet if I'm fighting bare-soul." Eiro pointed out, and Krog slowly crossed his arms, "What, you wanna freeze them to death with cold hands?" The heavy warrior asked, and Eiro just lightly sighed and pressed his palm onto Krog's neck. Even this rather experienced warrior flinched a bit in response.

"People that aren't used to it will have issues with any sort of extreme cold, especially if they don't expect it. And depending on if I manage to grapple them and hold them down for a while, I should be able to do good damage simply through skin-contact that I'm making anyway. I can't freeze other people just like that yet, after all."

"Right, I get it..." Krog said with a wry smile as he held his hand to his neck, and Eiro quickly got rid of the ice magic that he used to infuse his body. He stretched out a bit, and then proceeded to take off his shirt completely, placing everything on him besides his pants to the side.

The others were a bit surprised, "What are you doing?"

"I'm infusing myself completely with fire magic now. What, you want me to burn up my clothes?"

"Of course not..." Jess replied.

Eiro pulled out his spark-snapper and created flames again, before pushing them right onto his chest, feeding them into his body like that, making the fire magic spread through him via his heart. And the moment that he second-stage infused his body with the fire magic, the snow right around Eiro's body completely melted up and his body gave off a little steam at the same time.

The demon moved his arms around a little bit. It seemed like Eiro's body was a little bit quicker now, but beyond that, there wasn't a direct change by doing this beside the heat that Eiro was giving off. He would really just have to play around with this.

Then, when Eiro made the fire magic disappear from his body, he just waved his hands around to gather the air around him with magic, and then tried slowly but surely pressing it into his body as well. Similar to how it was with the water, it was a bit hard to do, although it was easier now that Eiro managed to get the hang of the basics. Doing it with Earth Magic later would be a bother, though...

Either way, Eiro soon infused himself with the 'essence' of Air Magic. His body felt basically weightless, and when he tried to run a little, he was able to do so at speeds much faster than when he just cloaked his body with wind magic. It was just that due to his light body, Eiro's attacks would most likely be pretty weak, and it would be harder to counter heavy attacks.

And then, at last, when Eiro tried it with earth magic using highly-refined rock prepared by Gondos, he had to really concentrate for a while. The whole concept of just 'absorbing' the rock felt pretty foreign to him somehow.

But soon enough, the rock's mass became less, while Eiro's became much higher, much more than he used up from the rock. Eiro's body became much heavier, of course, and his movements were pretty slow. Although, Eiro's skin was quite literally rock-hard, which reached even deeper than Eiro's rock-skin ability, and combined with just that rock-skin ability, it was like his skin was impenetrable.

Now, Eiro just had to figure out how to use all of this.