Demon's Virtue

Chapter 381 - Complexity

Eiro left the Arena, watching Richard swiftly scurry away after their interaction just now. Nelli was floating next to Eiro's head and stared at him, "Was that really necessary? He's just a kid."

"I know that he's just a kid. But considering that he threatened to have the children killed, and genuinely, truthfully meant that. I'm not letting someone like that get away with nothing." Eiro pointed out, "I should still think about how exactly to deal with this, though..."

"Can't you just kill the kid like you would anyone else?" Sarius suggested, and Eiro turned his head toward the Salamander, "Do you even understand why I agreed to be a teacher here at this school? At all?"

"Eh... Cause you're bored?"

"No, it's not because I'm bored. I'm wasting valuable time that I could use to train myself and push my plans further ahead. The reason I'm not doing that and am here instead is quite simple, really." Eiro started, and as he was about to continue, Gondos spoke his thoughts.

"It is because you wish to find new sides to yourself, is it not?" The Golem suggested, and Eiro immediately nodded his head, "That's exactly right, yes. From what I remember, when I saw the fragment of a 'human' in my soul, that boy was roughly the age of the kids here. Maybe a bit older, but not by much. Being around so many children, as emotional as they are, I might be able to learn something about that side of my soul, right? Most of the students here at Humans, after all."

"...Basically, you want to just expose yourself to as many vastly different humans, in the hope of becoming more human yourself?" Nelli asked, and Eiro nodded, "Mhm. I've already been trying, and it's working pretty well, I'd say. I helped that Rico kid just by talking to him about his worries, and I plan on helping Richard as well somehow. If I can fix others, then why not myself?"

Nelli turned her head to look at the other two spirits next to her, as Eiro let out a deep sigh and started to walk forward, away from the arena. He had to get to his next class now.

As he was walking over the campus, the Demon made sure to properly take notice of anything and everything that was happening around him. In particular, he wanted to make sure that there was no other sort of bullying going on right now. Because he knew that he wuld have to end up dealing with it, and he didn't want to be late for the next class.

Basically, Eiro just had a whole bunch of practical classes, and only a handful of theoretical classes. One of the theoretical classes was this morning, and now he had a practical magic class. And more specifically, it was a practical class for the magic-circle creation line of the Magic division.

Eiro swiftly made his way through the campus and reached the special room created for the actual magic practice, with strong barriers covering the walls so that nothing could go wrong. The students already gathered there, holding very basic wands in their hands.

As Eiro made his way inside, he already spotted most of his students in here. There were just a handful missing, but they also came just a minute or two after the bell was rung.

"Now, let's hope you won't be late for the next class, you three." The Demon sighed slightly, "So, just to make sure, but you all are second-year students, isn't that right?" Eiro asked, and the students quickly nodded their heads.

"Good, good. That means you already learned about the theory behind creating magic circles last year. For now, please create an 'Empty' Magic circle, please. Don't worry, nothing is going to happen with it for now, no pressure, I just want to see that you all are able to 'draw' magic into the air." The Demon explained, demonstrating exactly what he meant with an 'empty' magic circle.

While the students, were doing this, Eiro slowly got a certain book out of his treasury and proceeded to flip it to a particular few pages.

"Perfect. You all seem to have the basic requirements down. You can draw magic in the air, and shape-wise, your empty magic circles all seem nearly perfect as well. Sure, some of you took longer than others, but that's totally fine. For now, activate those magic circles so that they won't bother us anymore." The Demon suggested, and all of the empty glowing circles quickly disappeared from in front of the students.

"From now on, since you can all already do the basics, it's all relatively simple. It's like writing. For now, you know the letters. Let's say, a letter is each individual aspect of a magic circle. Like a rune, that seems simple enough, right?"

Eiro slowly started to draw a magic circle into the air. For now, he just drew a basic 'air' rune into the air.

"Then, using multiple letters, you can create words." Eiro continued, drawing a circle around the rune, and connecting it to two other runes inside of circles, forming a triangle of sorts.

"From those words, you then head off into the territory of sentences." The Demon added three more runes and connected those to each other in a triangle, creating a simple hexagram.

"And here we have it. Using letters and words, you create a coherent sentence. It's like speaking. You want to convey specific information, and use the knowledge you gathered so far for it." Eiro smiled lightly, and then glanced at the Grimoire in his hand, "And some people use those individual sentences to write books, to convey even more information."

Just like that, Eiro started to wave his hand around, expanding upon this relatively simple 'Gust' spell in extreme ways. Its size doubled and tripled, and became extremely complex.

"Take a look at this magic circle. It seems complex, but at the end of the day, I didn't particularly use different techniques than you all already know. If you wanted to, you could create a magic circle like this yourself." Eiro explained to the students, who were all just staring back at him in complete shock at what they were seeing. This thing was made so easily in front of them, within just a few moments.

"Now, can one of you tell me what exactly this magic circle does?" Eiro asked with a smile. The students thought for a few moments, until one of them raised her hand, "It's a modified version of the 'Gust' spell, and there are a lot of 'strengthen' runes to increase the effect of a spell... So I'd guess it's 'Gust', just a lot stronger?"

Eiro smiled lightly, "Exactly. This is an extremely strong 'Gust' spell." The Demon activated it, away from the children of course, and as if all air where they stood was suddenly being pushed forward rapidly, the students could feel their bodies being pulled forward. Some of them even had their wands pulled right out of their hand, but Eiro quickly caught them.

"Now, of course I could have made it so that this spell does many other things, but I only made it do this one thing. Do you think making this spell in that exact way was worth it for this result?" Eiro inquired, and the students looked at each other and thought about it for a bit.

"It seems like it, yes." One of them replied, and Eiro just smiled as he created another magic circle to show off another principle. He was specifically asked to do something like this by the theory teacher.

Eiro quickly created a smaller magic circle. It was still quite complex, but at least it was far more simple than earlier. And then, Eiro activated the magic circle, and one of the students fell to the ground as an even stronger gust of air was pushed into the opposite direction.

"So, how can you explain this? This smaller, less complex magic circle is more powerful than the giant, complex one from before." The Demon asked the students, but none of them replied, since they were simply incredibly confused.

"You see, the reason is simple. Just because something is complex doesn't mean it's better. Something that you should always strive to do as a Mage that uses magic circles is to simplify any of your magic circles. This small one was a directly simpler version of the large one from before. That being the case, what if I turned this smaller version into the centerpiece of another huge magic circle? What would happen then?"

One of the students raised their hand after Eiro's explanation, trying to answer, "It would become weaker again...?"

Eiro slowly shook his head, "Oh, no, no, that's not what I meant with 'complex doesn't mean better'. If you take a basic magic circle and add some other more complex parts onto it, with a specific thought-out plan, then it will make the magic circle stronger for sure. But it's not right to assume that any incredibly complex magic circle is incredibly strong as well. And it certainly doesn't mean your opponent is skilled. Rather than that... Can someone tell me why it could mean your opponent is less skilled than you?"

"Well, if you have two mages, and they cause the same exact effect through a magic circle, but one is simpler and the other is overly complex, then that means the one with the simpler magic circle is more skilled... Right?"

"Yes, exactly." Eiro replied, "Because the other mage didn't have as high an understanding of the principles of magic circles as you did, they had to resort to unnecessarily complex methods. I think everyone here understands the principle now. Could all of you recreate the 'Gust' spell for me? And make it as simple as possible. Don't worry about the strength for now."

Eiro slowly turned around as he watched the students excitedly get to work, before he noticed something surprising. Through one of the windows, he could see a familiar figure flying through the Sky. At first Eiro had hoped that it was Lognir coming back from the trip to spread the 'Necromancer' rumor, but he apparently already got back from that a couple of days ago, so it most likely wasn't him. And the castle was in the whole other direction.

So, Eiro quickly focused his eyes a bit more than he normally would, being in such a small room, and quickly realized that it was the Nephilim Ariella, slowly approaching the Academy for some reason.

Eiro could barely see her expression from here, but judging from her body-language, she was actually rather angry.. That probably wouldn't turn out too well for Eiro, then.