Demon's Virtue
chapter-691

Eiro looked at the others after his explanation. Knowing about this, things seemed a lot more... possible. If the Devil really had such weaknesses, becoming influenced by the same sins that he was supposed to control, then it would definitely be possible for them to face him. However, Eiro wanted to make one thing clear, "Even if that is the case, the Devil isn't someone that can be underestimated. If possible, we should still act like he doesn't have that weakness."

"...then why did you tell us? Wasn't that supposed to make us feel more confident about this?" Krog wondered, and Eiro looked at him with a slight smile, "In this case... 'we' really just means 'you'."

While they wanted to retort somehow, nobody could say anything in response to that. The only one that really had the ability to comprehend everything that was going on related to the Devil, and could even predict those actions to an extent, was Eiro. Even if the others tried, the intricacies of the Devil's actions weren't something they could just guess from the little information they had on him.

"But anyway, where I was going with this is simple. While the Devil might seem calm and collected, he's not really. He's petty, he's angry, and he's lazy. He doesn't like losing, and he definitely doesn't like being tricked," Eiro pointed out, beginning to guide his party through the structure around them. While he wasn't able to sense anything beyond the walls, he could still expand his senses through the halls. As they continued on, Eiro was not only creating a mental map of this place, which was useful even if it didn't technically make sense spatially, but he was also analyzing the patterns of this structure. Even if it seemed random, that wasn't really the case. Actually, compared to true randomness, if someone actively tried to make something 'appear' random, they ended up making it seem less random to someone that knew what they were looking for. If you had a sequence of ten coin-tosses, a complete, true fifty-fifty chance at either side appearing, it would be just as possible for a sequence of five 'tail' throws to appear as anything else. In the end, any combination of throws was just as likely as any other; that was the randomness. However, a sequence of the same results five times in a row simply didn't... look random enough. If you told someone to note down a random sequence of possible coin throws, they would only ever stick the same side right after each other two or three times in a row. What was truly random, and what 'appeared' random wasn't always the same.

And that was also the case for this structure. It was vast and complex, but it wasn't truly random. The Dungeon Map needed the user to manually construct and plan it. And even if they tried to make it random, it could never possibly be so. Everyone had their own unique habits, and the more that the party continued through this place, the more Eiro was understanding the habits of this Dungeon Master.

"Hmm... Let's hope that I'm right, and this time..." Eiro muttered. A cut opened on his fingertip and a bit of blood flew through the hallway in front of him. As the blood went past a certain threshold, some of the bricks making up the floor, ceiling and walls started to glow. A large section of the hallway had turned into another time-freeze field. The drop of blood was stuck mid-air.

"Alright, now let's get to pissing off the Devil," Eiro grinned, looking at his party members, "Get ready. I'm not sure how fast he's going to retaliate."

James looked at the stone Eiro had been holding onto for a while now, "So what exactly is going to happen?"

Eiro smiled, approaching the edge of the barrier, "We just spoke about card weaknesses, right? Well, the weakness of the Stopwatch is simple. The user can freeze time; but they'll keep aging. And actually, a good bit faster than before. And the longer each time-freeze session goes on, the faster they'll start aging. And after looking at these replicants, it's clear that even these are technically still linked to the original card's owner as the 'user', even if other people can activate them."

"So the devil has some random monster that's aging constantly... so what?" Jess asked, not sure she understood where Eiro was going. But the Demon couldn't help but keep smirking, "Actually, not in this case. If the owner of a card dies, then the card will be 'reset'. And from what I understand of these cards so far, that would make all the replicants useless, even if the card became linked to someone new. So, either, the Devil would need to ship out new timestop rings every time one monster dies from old age. I'm pretty sure that instead of that, the Devil kept that card to himself. There's a lot of those rings spread around, so the effect has to stack up a lot. The user of that stopwatch must be aging months, or even years, every week, considering how often he uses them."

"...And the devil doesn't age," Ariella added, and Eiro just looked at her with a light smile, "Well... I wouldn't say he doesn't age at all. While lower demons, like imps, can only get four of five years old, the ceiling for demons is exorbitant. A lot of the children of the 'Great Demon King' are still alive, but even they've gotten weaker. They age... we just don't know how long arch-demons can really live, cause we haven't gotten there yet."

"...Okay, so... I still don't get where you're going," James pointed out. Eiro continued, "Let's just say... a year for the Devil is about a minute for humans. Not sure if that's accurate, but let's just assume. So, if we want the Devil to age a year, we just need to have 525.600 minutes go by for him," Eiro poured mana into the stone that he was holding, throwing it into the barrier in front of him at the exact right moment.

But... nothing happened. Even so, Eiro couldn't contain his broad grin anymore, "You know, the Arcane Dealer was just a human at some point. And humans can't plan for every evntuality. I'm sure that the Arcane Dealer didn't plan on these cards being replicated like this. So why would he plan for the event that a card's effect overlaps itself?"

The party was catching up to what Eiro was saying.

"The effect of the replicates stopwatch is reduced to normal. Usually, it freezes time completely, or at least slows it much more, but here, it just slows things down incredibly. For a second to pass inside of the replicant's area of effect, it takes an hour outside of it. And well... basically, the effect of the replicants is sort of... well, reversed here. Usually, it speeds up the user, but here, it's used to slow things down. Both should be possible with the stopwatch, and should have the same side effect, anyway. The user has to pay for the time they manipulate. So, with that slow-down in there normally... for every second that passes out here, the Devil would age... well, since a replicant's side effects are generally a lot stronger, let's just say... two seconds at first. Then for the next second, he'll age three. Then five. Then ten, 15, 20. 30 seconds. And at some point, a minute. Then two, or three, or five. And now, let's imagine that aging effect is strengthened, because the slow-down factor increases by another hour," Eiro suggested. He looked at the stone that he had thrown into the zone. It was the core of the first trap that the party had encountered in this place, and he activated it again.

"So... inside of that second zone... for a second to pass, 150 days need to pass for us?" Jess asked, and Eiro nodded.

"Mhm. Exactly. But the system tracking the side-effects doesn't know what's happening in there right now. It just knows that instead of the 3600 that's usually the base... it's slowed down by... roughly 13 million," Eiro started, "And with that, the side effect stacks up. For the first second, out here, the devil will age an hour. By the tenth second... he'll age 2 days. By the fifteenth second, it's a whole month. By the twentieth... maybe a bit less than half a year? And it's going to keep growing and growing. So... let's just give it a couple of minutes. He should notice soon."