Demon's Virtue

Chapter 696: Disfigured

The Mountainbreaker struck the wall. The force traveled through Eiro's arm and into his body. He was able to weaken the impact by fusing his body with water magic, instead deflecting the energy back into the hammer perfectly in time to strengthen his second strike. And his third and fourth.

Each consequent strike was stronger than the one before it, and it didn't take long until the wall, originally strenghtened and kept together by the supernatural force of the Dungeon Map, wasn't able to resist the supernatural damage anymore.

Even without the system's assistance, as the system was unable to acknowledge what Eiro was doing due to the invisibility potion, the Mountainbreaker's arcane force was powerful enough to damage the physicality of the wall.

The stones crumbled, and Eiro could feel the space around him begin to crumble. As if the room was only kept together by these few stones, the air itself around the Demon distorted, and space was sucked out like the air out of of a balloon. And then, Eiro found himself in the space beyond the Dungeon Map.

He could feel his body being pulled on from all directions, while his insides were being crushed inwardly at the same time. Eiro was somewhere he shouldn't be; a space that didn't make sense to him, no matter how much he tried to figure it out. It was something simply beyond what he could recognize; a space that was too 'different'. An 'other' that didn't allow Eiro to gaze upon it. But that was fine.

All he had to do was make his way through here.

Eiro waded through the space, moving up when he tried to walk forward. It was to the point where he didn't know if this was a literal, physical space anymore, or if he had moved into a world of the mind, the conceptual. It was as though he had stepped into the space within the Arcane shard that was used by the Arcane Dealer to create the Dungeon Map in the first place.

He didn't feel his limbs anymore. His thoughts felt too tangible, as though he could touch them. As though he was staring at the letters of a story while it was being written out. Eiro no longer was a being of his own, but a creation controlled by a greater force. It felt comforting to let go, to simply disappear into the nothingness of the page.

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But...

Eiro couldn't simply let go.

He struggled, moving his arm forward. He couldn't feel anything, nor could he prove that his arm was really there. But still, he tried. In a metaphorical world, his mind was stronger than his body. He caught onto the letters of the world as its story was being written, and let it pull him along, back into the tangible.

With every moment that passed, Eiro's gaze moved away from the page, and he could feel the sensation in his limbs return. His palm pressed against stone. It was cold, and as he pushed against it, it seemed to be returning the favor, trying to reject Eiro's very presence. But he simply pushed through, forcing the wall to bend to his will.

As though being birthed from the stone, shaped by its mass and solidness, Eiro stepped onto the floor in front of him.

Feeling his feet touch solid ground again, the demon turned around and stared at the path that he had just created, but it was simply a normal wall. He stood in a long hallway, like the kind that most of this dungeon seemed to be made of. Eiro had made it through. He had no idea at all how long it had taken him to get through that space.

Even just trying to remember what happened there pained his mind; it was incomprehensible nonsense. But that wasn't what was important right now either. For however long the invisibility potion was still going to be in effect, Eiro had to hurry. He had to make use of this time well, and search this dungeon as much as he could without the interference of anything around him.

The threat that he had taken by drinking the potion like that was too much for him to simply waste the opportunity given to him.

After all, the side effect of the invisibility potion was simple. The more you drank it, the more the world would begin to forget about you. This was his third time truly fully drinking it, and he didn't know what the consequences of it might be. If he was lucky, then he would be wiped from the minds of a few random people he had met long ago.

People he had passed by who glanced at him and somehow remembered his appearance or what he had been doing. maybe he would be wiped from the memory of a few of the academy's students.

And if Eiro wasn't lucky, he could be wiped from some of his kids' memories. They wouldn't fully forget about him, of course, but he would disappear from some of the distinct memories they held. That time they went out shopping together in town? That time they went out to a fancy restaurant to celebrate a birthday?

They would remember everything else, but Eiro simply wouldn't be in that memory anymore. And the more he would drink the invisibility potion, the worse the aftereffect was going to be. And if he kept abusing this power, then he would be forgotten by everyone completely.

That was why Eiro didn't use this potion that much; he simply used its natural effects when it existed in its potion form to get similar effects that were weakened enough to not have these side-effects.

Eiro flew through the hallways as fast as he could, pushing his way through anything that he could find. At certain points, he could smell blood and in others he smelled faint smoke, and he even picked up the scents of his party members directly, but he didn't have the time to go to them directly. Eiro had the confidence that they were going to be fine in the first place.

Eiro just had to find the dungeon's core.

---

Jess held her breath, walking as quietly as she could. Using some air and earth magic spells, she was making sure that her footsteps didn't cause any vibrations either through the ground or the air to reach any of the creatures in the room. And 'creature' really was the only right word that she could think of here. They were nothing that she had ever seen before.

The same was the case with the monsters she had seen earlier; they shouldn't exist in that form. During her training, she had decided to read as many books as she could about monsters, and even took on the class of an 'Apprentice Zoologist' for a while, allowing her to more distinctly recognize living beings' traits and habits.

However, to her surprise, due to some random luck she had found herself quite close to the space that she and her party were looking for; the dungeon's core-room.

But she couldn't just run in and take care of it so that she and her party could concentrate on fighting the Devil better, since these 'creatures' were in the way. While they were vaguely humanoid, their bodies were stretched out disgustingly. Their flesh was dirty and their limbs didn't have the right appendages. Some had no fingers, others had too many.

Nothing was right about these things, as if someone had taken clay and pulled them randomly, just hoping to get them to look humanoid enough. But that couldn't even be said about the massive 'thing' in the center of the room. It was an amalgamation of dozens of these things, fused into one mass.

As if those improvised clay dolls were all thrown onto a single pile, that someone then violently stomped on.

Disfigured masses of flesh that were supposed to resemble arms stretched out from this into every direction. Some of them were slotting together random objects, others were sorting through materials; things like organs, eyes, limbs, all coming from different monsters, while another's focus seemed to be on a massive scroll, ten by twenty feet wide, even though it wasn't even fully unrolled.

That was the 'dungeon map'. And if that was the case; that disgusting mass in the center of the room was what controlled this place.

Jess had to be careful; she had to figure out a way to kill that thing without being noticed by it or its 'pawns'. That's why she was sneaking around, trying to get a good look at everything in the room. But then, she saw something that had her freeze up. Next to that mass stood another figure.

Next to the randomly distortioned creatures in this space, it took Jess a moment to realize that it was just a normal man. A mage, dressed in long white robes, interlocking his fingers behind his back, curiously looking at the dungeon map.

And Jess recognized him too. It was a man that she had only seen drawings of until now; as the conspirator who had caused one of the worst incidents in the history of Skyhart's capital.

He had been hidden away as a teacher of the Academy, causing an attack that killed, crippled, and terrorized many students. But a while ago, he ran away after his plans were somehow revealed. It was the man who considered not only Armodeus, bot those kids' grandfather a brother, but became too obsessed with the concept of being a 'Master'.

It was Merlin; an Arcane Mage and a monster-obsessed maniac.