Demon's Virtue
chapter-475

Eiro swam closer toward the Lord of the Lake, but the moment he did so, this giant serpent's body began to move around, as if it was getting angry at someone approaching it. The Demon immediately stopped moving when he noticed this. He really didn't want to antagonize this Magic Beast.

"Don't worry, I'm here to free you." Eiro tried to explain to it, but it didn't seem like the Lord of the Lake wanted to hear any of it. Which kind of made sense, because why would it trust someone like him? Although, Eiro was a bit surprised that it was acting so mindlessly. Eiro figured it would be as smart as a Dragon, if not smarter, so it should be able to at least understand the tone of his voice, but it just seemed like Eiro was talking to an animal...

Was he wrong? Was the Lord of the Lake really just a monster? Eiro thought that this might be the case for a second, but immediately threw that thought away. He knew that it was a Magic Beast, that was for sure. Eiro knew the difference between Monsters and Magic Beasts pretty well by now. It was really quite annoying though, not knowing how to interact with the Lord of the Lake at all.

And that was when something caught Eiro's eye, something practically right beside the Lord of the Lake's body. It was weirdly curved, and it was a quite huge structure. So, Eiro tried to investigate. And soon, he was able to see what it was.

"It's... It's an egg's shell..." The Demon muttered, as he looked at this truly enormous fragment of what clearly seemed to be an egg. Just from the materials, that's what it had to be. Eiro knew that the eggs of a fish were practically completely spherical, so from this small piece, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out the size of the actual egg.

The moment that Eiro completely visualized everything within his mind, his heart skipped a few beats. This... couldn't be. This was clearly a mistake. This eggshell must have grown after absorbing the lake's water or something... although that seemed rather unlikely as well.

Eiro pressed his hand onto his chest, and slowly twisted his body around as he looked at that enormous serpent behind him. Now Eiro knew why it wasn't to be reasoned with, at least. Eiro swam through the water, trying to travel as fast as he could, until he reached the snout. Eiro constructed a special spell, and when it was finished, a large amount of water suddenly compressed right in front of Eiro. It created a rather strong current that nearly pulled Eiro right into it, but he was able to pull the water that was flowing out of his body back, luckily.

A moment later, a huge hand, created out of highly-compressed water could be seen right in front of Eiro. The Demon slowly moved his own hand, and the giant water-hand moved together with it. He moved the water-hand toward the Lord of the Lake's head, and simply... rubbed over it. Slowly and gently, of course. But it was enough to clearly calm the Lord of the Lake down at least a little bit.

It started relaxing a bit at this touch of a being it didn't even know, and Eiro slowly swam up to one of its absolutely enormous eyes. He stayed there, calmly floating in front of it, and tried to do anything he could to bring across the concept that Eiro was just trying to help it. It really didn't take long until the Lord of the Lake's body slumped down again, as if it just wanted to rest.

And of course, it probably did.

Newborns needed a lot of sleep, whether they're people, or enormous sea-serpents.

Eiro stepped back into the castle, taking a deep breath now that he was actually able to breathe air again, and stood in the center of the courtyard. Eiro pressed his foot into the dirt, and a hole simply opened up.

"You sure you know what you're doing?" Sarius asked with a wry smile, seeing Eiro so recklessly do what he was doing, and the Demon immediately nodded his head, "Yup, of course I do. I'm just a bit pissed off, you know?"

"What, why that? Did that water snake say something weird to you?" The fire spirit asked, and Eiro immediately shook his head, "Of course not. It couldn't, even if it wanted to." Eiro replied immediately.

"The reason why I'm pissed off is that moronic Imp from earlier clearly wasn't the one that constructed the system to keep the Lord of the Lake in chains. The people that lived here back then did that on their own."

"Huh? Why would they want to trap a being that is practically their guardian deity?" Gondos asked confused, and Eiro slowly stopped and turned his head, "Gondos, people used even you, a Spirit. Whether it's really where you came from or not, in myth, the world itself was the one that created you personally, like she did with every single spirit. The world is often seen as a force even above the gods. If people can do something like that to you... They can certainly exploit a creature they believed to be a monster, no matter how calm and helpful it was to them." The Demon pointed out, before sighing deeply as he continued walking. It was a bit more silent after that, as Gondos thought about Eiro's words a bit more.

Meanwhile, Eiro reached the entrance into the place he needed to be for this. He pushed open the large, ornately decorated door, although most of the decoration had already been pulled out by some Imp's filthy little hands, and saw the space beyond. It was a beautiful, sight. Really.

In front of him, a large hall spread out, right in the center of what was clearly one of the largest masses of magic that had ever been found in this world. This wasn't even a fact people knew about, publicly it was said that this island was brought to float through the influence of a great mage. Well, maybe that was still kind of the truth, though.

Eiro found himself in the center of a truly enormous magic stone. Or rather, a huge crystal that was similar to a magic stone, the 'Gravity' kind, to be more precise. The inner part of this area seemed to be naturally hollow, or at least it wasn't hollowed out by the hands of people. And on the inner walls of this huge crystal were numerous runic carvings, and patterns that clearly belonged to magic circles, or rather, artificing.

Someone, a master of both magic and artificing combined, tapped into this magic stone and made it so that this island could be kept afloat. And then, some sort of sloppy moron ruined everything. In the center of this large crystal cave stood a circle of eight large white monoliths, simply forced into the ground.

They were clearly placed somewhere where they were supposed to tap into the magic exerted by the floating island so that they could create the power needed to chain up the Lord of the Lake somehow. The areas they picked were... alright, but just barely. This whole array in here was set up so that if a certain part of it was damaged, everything could still work nearly perfectly. But whoever constructed this... disgusting structure of monoliths had analyzed everything enough to figure out that the areas where the pillars were placed had a high amount of importance to the structure, which would let them tap into the power of the crystal as much as possible.

However, after that, they created an octagon-type magic circle amongst the eight pillars. Which in itself wasn't that bad yet. It was actually carved in a way that allowed the rest of the array to function at nearly peak condition. While the sub-circle created with the monoliths wasn't activated, that was.

It was part of the reason why the island was hanging so low now. Usually, it would probably have the power to carry even the whole weight of the Lord of the Lake, but with this perfect display of idiocy, that was no longer the case.

Luckily, while this thing was activated, it was clear that someone damaged this sub-circle somehow. They just accidentally created a deep scratch within it, which changed the flow of the magic through the circle. It immensely weakened the sub-circle, and let the island actually stay afloat.

That scratch was also the only reason why Eiro was able to easily deactivate this sub-circle, since it allowed him to simply expand on the scratch to weaken the sub-circle enough to just completely deactivate it.

And now that that was the case... Eiro could alter this sub-circle so that he could somehow tap into the force that this huge crystal could exert, which would practically mean that he could just steer this island wherever he wanted to go.

"Armodeus is gonna love this place..." Eiro muttered slightly, as he continued carving into the crystal surface.