Demon's Virtue

The Demon ran his finger through the notification to make it disappear and then looked at Arc. "Where exactly are we right now?" He asked, because he wasn"t sure exactly how long he was out, other than Clementine"s "two day" statement, and how long the breaks they had taken were.

After a bit of thought, Arc swallowed his food and replied, "We pa.s.sed by close to that "Zugberg" village a couple of hours ago." He explained, and Eiro opened his eyes wide in response.

"Wait, really?" He asked, "We"re that far along already?" With a bright grin on his face, Eiro couldn"t stop thinking about how much he was really in Solomon"s debt now. This carraige and the two Aria were really amazing. More amazing than he would have expected, even.

"Then it won"t take that long to get there, huh?" Eiro smiled lightly and looked at the ground. Soon, he noticed the Gnome floating next to him. He seemed a bit weaker than he did before right now. It seems like they would have to help the Gnome out a bit more with "finding its name".

Eiro started thinking about what they could be doing from now on during the trip if they could allow themselves to be more leisure about some things. If they continued like this, they would end up reaching their destination within the next two or three weeks, after all.

"Alright... Everyone done eating?" Eiro asked as he slowly stood up and saw that everyone was seemingly finished or at least close to finis.h.i.+ng, "We"re training a bit. Let"s make use of your new cla.s.ses a bit. Your skills should be boosted through it, after all." The Demon pointed out as he slowly made his way to the carraige, basically dragging his legs behind him as he was doing so.

"Eh? Wait, now?" Clementine asked confusedly, "But shouldn"t we get moving a bit first? And you should definitely rest!" She pointed out, but Eiro just smiled at her, "Don"t worry, this is the perfect place. There"s n.o.body around here at all, and I"m not noticing any monsters either." The demon explained as he slowly started stretching a bit, making his joints crack a bit in response.

"And I feel the fact that I"ve been laying around for two days in my whole body. Bothers me even more than the pain. Come on, get your things, we"ll clean up later." Eiro announced to them, leaving them not a single chance at denying him.

They stood up and made their way over to the carriage to get their new weapons and even their armor, considering that they knew they would be doing some sparring instead of just general "practice". And while the others were standing up and walking to the carriage all of a sudden, Felix followed them, thinking that they would keep going again. But instead, Eiro had something else in mind for him.

"Come." The Demon said and pulled Felix over behind him. Eiro looked around a bit, staring at the different trees standing right here, and then found the perfect specimen for what he had in mind.

Eiro ran his hand over the bark a bit before pulling out one of his tools out of his treasury, just taking off a square-meter of bark off of this tree before smoothing the actual wood down a bit to be easier to work with. He then handed Felix one of the carving knives that Eiro had just picked up from the carriage.

"Carve into it." Eiro told Felix, and then grabbed the boy"s hand and brought the dagger to the wood, "Carve." He repeated, and Felix looked at Eiro confused before forming a wry smile on his face.

"You want me to... cut into the... tree?" Felix asked, and Eiro slowly nodded his head, before Felix just stabbed the knife into the wood with frustration, "Don"t f.u.c.k with me!" He yelled out, something that made him even more frustrated somehow. Even when he was as loud as he could be, his voice didn"t reach his own ears.

"How can I just... sit here and... do this s.h.i.+t if... If he can come here any moment..? I"m terrified!" Felix exclaimed, "He crippled me! Wh-What if he finds us again?! I... Please, we need to... leea... leeaf... leaea..." He yelled with frustration. It seemed like he was thinking too much about what he was saying again, and his words just became completely messed up in response to it.

Felix started staring down at the ground and squatted down, his whole body s.h.i.+vering. With a sigh, Eiro pulled out the empty notebook that he had in his treasury together with his ink-pen before writing something onto one of the empty pages.

Eiro squatted down and held the open book in front of Felix. The boy slowly read the message, which was hard to do with the tears in his eyes, and then slowly turned his head back up with a smile of mixed emotions.

It seemed as if he was happy about it in part. Another part of that expression was actually still bitter about it. And another part of it was an expression of self-hatred that came from the first part. After all, he was just told that Eiro killed his father, so what kind of person would he be if he was happy about having a dead father.

"You... really? He"s.... he"s dead?" Felix asked, his body both slumping down and weirdly tensing up. He seemed both relieved and scared, just judging from this.

Eiro quietly nodded his head, and a few moments later, Felix started actually processing all of this. "He"s dead...? He"s dead... He"s actually dead..." Felix muttered quietly. He started laughing for a short moment, but then supressed himself from continuing with that, even if it took him a bit to completely get that command through to himself.

"Stand up." Eiro sighed as he pulled on Felix"s arm to get him to stand up, and then placed the young man"s hand onto the handle of the carving knife again before he wrote something down in the notebook again.

"Use your emotions for work", he wrote. Sure, it could be seen as Eiro just saying "Stop whining and get to work", but that wasn"t it at all. Eiro truly believed that any sort of emotion could be turned into something productive. Whether it be glee, anger, grief, anything really. He didn"t like being controlled by his emotions, so he wanted to control his emotions like that instead.

Of course, that didn"t mean that he supressed his emotions, but rather that he didn"t let his emotions do whatever they wanted.

Slowly, Felix nodded his head and wiped the tears out of his face before pulling the knife out of the wood, and then just started to cut into it a bit here and there. It seemed like he wasn"t sure what to do, but that was fine. At least Felix was trying to actually do something instead of just staring at the wood, which was a good enough start.

Eiro turned back around and then looked at Nelli, "There"s a river over there, can you prepare a couple buckets" worth refined water for me and bring it here?" He asked, and Nelli swiftly nodded her head.

"Sure~!" She said and then floated into the other direction, while Eiro turned over toward the children who had gotten ready by now.

"All of you, first things first, do your regular practice with your new items. Sammy and Clementine, you two partner up. So clementine, just try making small water-based targets for Sammy in the air. Maybe make them move around a bit. And switch it up where you have to sometimes make arrows stop that Sammy shot into the empty air and you have to hurry up." Eiro suggested to them, and the children quickly nodded their heads.

"We"ll try magic infusion with these items in a bit. Just don"t do it before Nelli or I are there to directly watch you, to make sure nothing goes wrong." The Demon said, and everyone slowly nodded their heads and got started, while Eiro looked at the Gnome that was floating behind him.

Eiro sat down cross-legged on the dirt and called the immature spirit over. "Alright, I know we don"t have a contract just yet, but just do what I tell you for a bit." Eiro told the Gnome, and it just floated there for a while, which Eiro took as a "yes".

The Demon placed both of his hands onto the ground and started pus.h.i.+ng pulses of mana into it to make it spread through the area, "You can feel this, right?"

Slowly, the Gnome let its body sink down so that it was touching the dirt where Eiro currently had most of the mana focused onto, "Good. I want you to do the same thing as I just did using your own magic." The Demon explained and then proceeded to pull the mana that he had pushed into the ground back out of it and then made it focus around the Gnome"s body instead so that Eiro could feed it to him. Eiro had to try and explain it to the Gnome a couple more times after this, but relatively soon, it understood what Eiro was trying to tell it and started just "standing" on the floor. It basically just pressed its stiff, barely humanoid legs onto the ground, but that was good enough for Eiro since the gnome then proceeded to push mana out of its body, as was confirmed by Nelli soon after.

Eiro looked at the immature Spirit and then kept giving it instructions, "Good. Now, since you have the ability to perceive mana, this should be pretty easy for you, shouldn"t it?" Eiro started, "Simply see the mana you just pushed out as an extension to your own body. Act as if this part of the ground wasn"t just the ground you are sitting on, but that it"s you yourself." Eiro told the spirit before he pressed his own feet against each other.

"Then make your mana flow through the ground in a spiral that both flows outward and inward." The Demon instructed, before he started moving his own mana through his body to speed up his mana regeneration so that he had enough mana to feed to the Gnome.

Soon, Nelli told Eiro that the Gnome was following what he was saying, and Eiro nodded his head in satisfaction. He was glad the gnome understood him that easily, since it seemed somewhat dumb most of the time.

"Let the mana from the ground"s inward spiral move into your body, make it flow through your core, and then make it flow back out through the outward spiral under you. And keep increasing the size of the spiral more and more with the mana I"m giving you. But don"t waste any of the mana." Eiro said as he took a deep sigh so that he could relax properly.

And from then on, for roughly an hour, that"s basically all that they did. While the children were practicing their own things, and Felix was carving into the tree to cope with his complicated emotions, Eiro and the Gnome were working together to spread the Gnome"s perception of nature out as far as possible.

Of course this didn"t work well enough so that the Gnome could find its name right off the bat, but it seemed to be a lot more energetic after this. Glad that it at least seemed to do a little for the Gnome, Eiro figured that they should keep going this whenever they stopped for the night from now on. Like this, it surely wouldn"t be that hard for the Gnome to find its own name. Nelli seemed to agree with that too, of course, and actually didn"t even make a sarcastic comment about it for once.