Demon's Virtue
chapter-501

Eiro looked at the message in front of him, and then stared at the flurry of messages that appeared in front of him.

[You have reached Level 100]

[Possible Evolutions]

-[...

Before the windows had even fully opened up, they... disappeared. But in a weird way. They flickered in and out of existence for a few moments, and the letters on the notifications were displaced, showing nonsensical words. And there were even moments that Eiro had never seen before, but he still ingrained them into his mind.

However, as Eiro was watching this flickering, the word 'glitch' popped up in his mind, although he was unsure where exactly it came from. The notifications kept glitching for a few moments, and soon disappeared altogether.

And then, a new notification appeared in front of Eiro, of a type that he had never seen before. He had layed eyes on message windows of quite a few different colors, but this one... it was weird. It was like it was a more stationary, permanent form of those glitching notifications from earlier. It looked like a cracked mirror, each shard slightly displaced to create its unique version of the image that should have fallen onto it. Just that here, each shard of the window floating in front of Eiro showed a unique version of itself. The colors were slightly off in each, and when Eiro moved his head around, the colors in each were changing, like some sort of weird reflection of light.

But more importantly, it took a while for the letters to actually come in, something that had never happened before. Usually, the notifications would appear with all the information already on them from the start, from the moment they came into existence. But now? The words were slowly appearing in front of Eiro letter by letter, and the message window changed its form to accomodate the ever-growing information.

{[A Legendary Evolution Option has been found. A certain amount of probabilities have been consumed to power said evolution. Do you wish to initiate the evolution?]}

Eiro looked at the message, but slowly shook his head, "No, not yet."

{[It is reccomended to initiate the evolution as soon as possible. Do you wish to initiate the evolution?]}

Confused, since he already said 'no' once, Eiro stretched his hand out to run his fingers through the notification like always, "No, I will not initiate the evolution. Not yet." He said, but then, he felt something. And it wasn't just the slight hint of air flowing inbetween his fingers whenever he ran them through a message window... but he was touching a solid surface. Not even when he touched these windows with time slowed down to an absolute crawl was he able to touch it like this.

It would always start falling apart a moment later, which was still a lot longer than he normally had, but it was enough time for him to interact with it. But now? He was able to touch it, grasp it with both his and could even physically pull the notification around wherever he wanted.

"What the..." Eiro muttered, and the three spirits around him looked at the Demon somewhat confused, "What's going on? What are you doing?" Nelli asked, and Eiro turned his head, "I'm looking at this notification, that's what. It's weird."

"...what notification?" Sarius asked, and Eiro stopped for a moment, "You three can't see it..?"

"No, we can not. What does it say?" Gondos inquired, so Eiro quickly explained to them what he was seeing, but they had no idea what he was speaking of. They had never heard of something like this before either.

"...Erm... again, 'No'. I will not evolve yet." Eiro said clearly, and the words in the notification slowly disappeared again, soon to be replaced.

{[Evolution will not yet be initiated. It is reccommended to evolve as soon as possible]}

"Alright, alright, I'll evolve soon... in a few days." Eiro muttered quietly, and to his surprise, the information on the message changed again.

{[The System complains about the vague time estimate]}

"....Excuse me...? 'The system'... 'The system complains'..?" Eiro muttered with a wry smile, absolutely confused about what was suddenly going on with the notifications in front of him.

"No matter that, just disappear." He grumbled quietly, trying to just crack the whole window in half. A few moments of trying later, a new message appeared.

{[The System will rest until the time of the evolution]}

The notification window suddenly shrunk down, and seemed to move directly onto Eiro's chest, as if sitting within the center of the patterns that were covering the Demon's whole body. Eiro couldn't really sense the window anymore, and when he looked at system information, like his status, after that, the windows all looked normal and were fully visible to the spirits again.

"This was pretty weird." Eiro whispered, as he slowly turned around toward the corpse of that huge wyvern. He approached it, trying to forget about those weird status windows for now, as he started to cut out a huge fillet out of the wyvern's body.

With some fire magic, Eiro started heating the meat up in specific patterns so that he could create some decent food for himself.

"I'm really hungry somehow, though..." Eiro muttered slightly. He let the meat cook a bit more, and for now just started to think about how to assign the 110 stat points that he had in his status. He wanted to assign them before the evolution, so that he could reap as many benefits from it as possible.

He quickly spent 24 stat points to bring his perception to 300. And since the greatest benefits always came when one's stats overcame the 100-point thresholds, Eiro quickly brought the two stats that he could actually bring there with his currently available stat points to the next stage. He got his resistance and evasion to 200 respectively. And the leftover 15 he invested into his lowest stat, charisma, since he figured it was still rather useful sometimes.

[Your perception has surpassed the 300 point threshold! The [Sharp Senses] Ability has been upgraded to [Superior Senses]]

[Your resistance has surpassed the 200 point threshold! The [Rock Skin] Ability has been upgraded to [Lesser Metal Skin]]

[Your evasion has surpassed the 200 point threshold! The [Adrenaline Rush] Ability has been upgraded to [Hyper Adrenaline Rush]]

"Alright, this will definitely help me out a bit." Eiro smiled lightly while blinking a little bit. The upgrade of the perception ability messed up his control of his senses for a moment, but he was able to adjust rather quickly. He was still waiting for the meat to finish being cooked through, so he looked at his left hand and activated the 'Lesser Metal Skin' ability.

Instead of growing rough and rock-like as it did before, Eiro's skin stayed relatively smooth, and instead turned into a metallic substance. It was amongst the weaker metals that Eiro knew of, but it was still quite a bit stronger than rock. But the thing was that Eiro was unable to actually identify the metal. It was like his skin itself had really been transmuted into its own unique metal through magic.

He tried to move his hand around like normal, but his movements were heavily restricted, just as he expected. The metal was relatively malleable, but it still slowed him down quite a bit, and it was much heavier than the rock was. But with a few adjustments, Eiro was able to at least solve the first of those issues. He changed the exact areas where the metal would appear, to make sure that it wouldn't appear in the cracks of Eiro's hand that actually allowed for movement. As if he was creating some sort of gauntlet for himself right now.

"Interesting." Eiro muttered slightly, as he layered more metal on top of the one that was already there. While the metal before took on the same exact color of his skin, he was able to control it a bit more for the layers further removed from his flesh, and he could make it look as if it was simple iron or steel.

"Hm..." Curious if this would actually work, Eiro slowly took off the armor pieces covering his upper body, and quickly created layers of his 'Lesser Metal Skin' ability appear all over his torso and arms. By manipulating exactly where he wanted to create this metal, he was actually able to create something that looked like any other sort of armor, even if it did have some more unique touches to it. If it came down to it and Bavet wasn't nearby, Eiro would be able to rely on this ability to just cover his skin up and pretend he was wearing some sort of armor. Or well, he could simply use his mask, cloak and gloves that he had in his treasury at all times, but it was always nice to have multiple alternatives.

And as he was removing this 'natural' armor, Eiro looked at his hand, and then at the meat that was still cooking atop a large rock slab that he created a few moments earlier. Eiro summoned flames with his right hand and pressed them against the metal-covered left hand, and watched as the metal heated up immensely. It was glowing in a bright yellow at some point, and while it didn't seem to want to melt at any point, it was still incredibly hot. This would probably open up a few more possibilities in combat... by simply melting their flesh with his glowing, hot metal hand.

And while Eiro quickly cooled his hand down again, luckily without anything like cracks suddenly appearing in his skin, he noticed that the wyvern steak seemed to be just about finished. And so, Eiro began to eat a little bit, and would then later head off to get back home again.