"Did you hear about the new guy?""Oh, the idiot?"
"Yeah, that one…Can"t believe he actually managed to kill the Great Serpent that has been plaguing the Lake for so many years. I expected him to at the very least know about the purpose of our order, but he knew next to nothing! The only thing he knew was gardening-related tasks!"
"Indeed, it was disappointing, so what did our superiors have him do?"
"The elder made him one of the workers, tasked with carrying the extracted oil from the mines to our village by cart."
"Is that really going to be ok? He seemed pretty dumb even by fool"s standards…more water we gave him to get his senses in order, the more erratic he started to behave…"
"It is just manual labor, not even a simpleton can screw it up."
The two humans guarding the two demons and the Darkling discussed their newest recruit.
Now that the Great Serpent was gone, Pishak Priests were planning on attacking the Oni Village that was on the other side of the lake, but in order to do that, they needed to be prepared.
* * *
"World is spinning….Or is it just me…"
"The old guy told me to transport the barrels of oil by cart….Why am I doing this….better question…where am I? I guess it doesn"t matter….Maybe this is a dream?"
The drunken young man ended up spilling quite a lot of oil on his trail, he already did this several times, and so by now he was very exhausted.
So, he proceeded to lie down on the ground, surrounded by the crops.
"My head feels fuzzy for some reason…Why am I here? Was I always doing this?"
Before he was sent out, he was given a pipe; apparently it was their way of being friendly.
"So how do I use this?"
Then, within young man"s mind echoed the words of his grandfather.
"Absorption is a very powerful and dangerous skill, there is a reason only Demon Lord level demons manage to even learn it, much less master it. Absorption allows me, someone with no affinity for water magic, to produce water-based spells at an advanced level, not only that, using this skill, I am able to access any element I want. But such power comes at a price of being very risky to use. A single misstep could prove fatal. Which is why…. I will make sure train you until you can master it and perform it by instinct!"
After that his grandfather drilled him on the skill of Absorption non-stop, until Ren ended up reaching a point that he would end up seeing his grandfather"s lectures in his sleep.
Young man closed his eyes.
"Feel the energy surrounding you, extend the reach of your mind, take control of the power surrounding you, pull it towards yourself….Let it flow within your body like a stream."
Mana within the atmosphere started to gather in young man"s direction, little by little, they were flowing towards him, absorbed into him.
"Do not absorb more than you can handle, when you reach your limit, stop the flow of energy into your body and then use the energy stored within your body."
With a single gesture of his hand, his index finger caught on fire, which he proceeded to use to lite his pipe.
Too bad, he did not know how to use a pipe.
Before he could do anything else, he ended up tripping, dropping the pipe on the ground.
Unfortunately, due to the oil he had spilled near the fields, everything quickly went up in flames.
Fire spread from the fields, and then, it reached the village where the humans lived.
But young man could only stare at the flames with a gaze filled with admiration and awe.
"So beautiful….I hope they have some musical instruments because this calls for a celebration! h.e.l.lo big orange red thing! Wanna be my friend?"
Obviously, he was still completely drunk, not realizing he was acting like a complete loon while everything within the human village was burning down to the ground.
Humans were screaming and panicking as all of them proceeded to evacuate.
Now the prisoners were left in their cells, humans did not free them, hoping even if they could not take away the powers of the demons, at least they would perish in flames.
But as the flames spread, many humans ended up losing their lives to them.
* * *
"What"s going on? I can hear loud noise….it"s getting rather toasty in here!"
"This smell…Don"t tell me they are trying to burn us alive!" Doran started panicking.
"We need to get out of this cell!"
They struggled against their chains to no avail, they were simply stuck, and none was coming here for them.
Then, Orin"s eyes caught a sight of someone very familiar.
"Hey, do you guys know where they keep their guitars? Or any string instrument will suffice…."
"Boss! You are safe!"
"Huh? Oh, is that you Orin? How have you been? Are we home already? Have you been redecorating?"
"This is a prison, you d.a.m.n fool!" Doran ended up exclaiming.
"Ah, is that so. Well, anyways…"
Ren approached the cell and with a single touch, he released the mana within his body in a ma.s.sive shockwave, sending the metal door of the cell flying off its hinges.
Not realizing that his body was much stronger under the effect of absorbing mana from the atmosphere, he unconsciously ended up using earth type magic to momentarily harden his hand, and with it he proceeded to deliver a hand chop on the handcuffs Orin, Doran, and Toro had on them.
It was almost as if his hand was a razor sharp knife that could cut through steel like b.u.t.ter.
But such was the power of Absorption, there is a reason it is a Demon Lord level Skill, for it makes the user extremely powerful while using it, but the trick is controlling it, and it will only last as long as the user does not use up the absorbed mana.
"Boss, since when can you do that?" Orin was amazed that Ren could just get rid of hand-cuffs just by hand chopping them, almost as if they were made of fragile wood.
"Today, I guess…Oh, found it! Time for my serenade!"
"What??!" Orin, Toro, and Doran were left with their mouths wide open as Ren ended up finding a musical instrument called a shamisen.
Without any hesitation, he exited the prison, with the now freed prisoners following him.
"What the h.e.l.l is he doing?!" Doran voiced his disbelief at what just happened.
"Boss is boss, there is no telling what he is thinking or what he will do next, but he is the demon I swore to serve until the end of my days."
"Swore to serve…Orin, do you mean to tell me that hoodlum is…."
"Ren Karatengu, yes that is boss."
"I can"t believe it."
"Look! At the top of that building!" Toro pointed at the roof of one of the buildings, strangely, it was the only one that was not completely one fire.
Sitting on top of the roof, with a loony expression on his face, Ren was playing a strange melody on his shamisen.
The screams of humans running for their lives, all the death and destruction around him seemed to only add into his music.
And play the music he did, strangely enough, it sounded oddly beautiful.
The flames were dancing in tune with his melody, like the waves that kept swallowing everything in their wake.
After playing the shamisen for what seemed like an eternity, Ren finally came back to his senses.
He was now sober, now aware that everything around him was not a dream.
"What have I done?"
Ren uttered those words as he looked at the flames that were consuming everything around him and the humans who were fleeing for their lives, but the three prisoners were the only ones to stay.
"He single-handedly destroyed their entire village….Amazing…"
"Told ya, Boss is always there when you need him most."
Orin confidently smiled without knowing that Ren was currently overwhelmed by the epiphany due to realizing the consequences of his drunken actions.
"Well, I already caused this much damage…So I might just sing along. Up in flames it goes…."
Now completely sober Ren began his melody.
Somehow, this reminded him a lot of his own village that was razed to the ground by the knights who attacked it. There, he lost everything, his loved ones, his parents, and his brother. He was left alone.
Now, this fire managed to make him remember the scene that he wished he could forget, yet the memories of his past were steadily coming back, and he knew that sooner or later, he would remember who he was.
Clearing his mind, he sighed.
This was not the first village he ended up destroying, no, in the human world, he ended up doing the same thing to at least four different villages, on four different occasions.
He burned down one village, caused a flood in another, and if he remembered correctly, he ended up making round sculptures from large rocks that ended up tumbling down and crushing many houses.
And those were the incidents he could now begin to recall, he was sure that he might have done far more than that.
What he did not realize was that due to his actions, Pishak Priests had to abandon their base and give up on their ambition of exterminating the residents of the Oni village. Needless to say, it was a very devastating blow to the Pishak Priests, many of whom lost their lives within this incident which later came to be called the "Great Fire".