Demon's Virtue

Chapter 756: The Hand-to-Hand Combat Aspect

"So... what? You fused your life force with fire essence and now you think that solves all your problems? Does that mean you don't need my training?" Kassandra crosser her arms, tapping her foot on the ground. With a shake of the head, Eiro quickly replied.

"No, no, I do still need your training. And not just physically in order to improve and fine-tune my hand-to-hand combat techniques, but to learn how exactly you use your life force," the demon pointed out with a smile on his face, ready to learn from the master, but Kassandra didn't seem quite so excited about it.

"What's the problem? Doesn't that fusion thing already fix all that for you?" she wondered, but Eiro immediately shook his head.

"Of course not. My life force now has flame-like qualities, but the patterns in which you move your life force, whether that its something you do intentionally or a trained instinct accrued over the time that you've been refining your life force, are still things that I need to learn about."

"... Fine, I guess so," Kassandra sighed, waving Eiro over, "In that case, come over here."

The demon raised his brow, and did as told, soon being prompted to expose his back. Kassandra placed her hand onto it, seeming a little confused, "Uhm... where's your heartbeat exactly?"

"I don't have one."

"And why don't you have one?" Kassandra asked, taken aback.

"Well, I don't have a heart anymore. I mentioned that, right?"

"...I thought that was some kind of weird joke. You really don't have a heart? Like, physically, you don't have a heart?" Kassandra asked, and Eiro quickly shook his head.

"No, I'm just using magic to make my blood flow through me instead. It's actually far more efficient than it may sound," the Demon explained, but Kassandra just seemed a bit more hesitant after that.

She let out a long sigh, before Eiro could feel a soft warmth entering his body through his back. It didn't move in particularly far, though. What Kassandra was doing was pushing her own life force into Eiro's body, and the demon quickly reacted in understanding.

He felt the patterns that Kassandra was creating with her life force, those soft, but at times fierce waves of heat, like a small campfire burning away. Eiro quickly copied that pattern, feeling the essence of the flame fill his body even more than before.

He could understand why it would help particularly with certain stances of Kassandra's hand-to-hand combat, and the master quickly explained, "That's low heat, alright? And next is high heat."

Almost instantly, Kassandra's life force changed. Instead of being soft and welcoming, it was an aggressive and repulsive flame, like the fire burning down what used to be a home. But even so, Eiro quickly copied that pattern as well. And soon, he felt his body adapt to that pattern as well. It was a similar feeling to before, but one that was turned up to extreme levels.

Like the aggressiveness of the flame was about to make him move against his will. Though, it seemed to support his movements in extremely specific ways, so it was only applicable to one or two of the stances that Eiro knew about.

"... Next come the embers," Kassandra said with a hesitant voice. Eiro could feel that she was a little annoyed for some reason. Though, Eiro could probably guess why she was annoyed, if he was totally honest. Kassandra disliked, if not hated, Eiro from the very beginning. He didn't even know why she had agreed to teach him, but he figured he shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

That being the case, Kassandra was clearly bothered that Eiro was able to adjust his life force to the different patterns or 'states' that Kassandra was trying to show to him so easily. But Eiro felt no need to hold himself back just to make Kassandra feel better; at this point, she would probably realize that Eiro was doing so anyway, and that might make her even more angry.

So, through the different patterns that Kassandra was showing him, Eiro adjusted just as quickly as he felt like he needed to in order to properly feel that he had moved the current state of his life force as close to that of Kassandra's as possible.

"Such a showoff," Kassandra clicked her tongue as she stepped back, as Eiro pulled his shirt back on.

"Is that all of the patterns?"

"Yes, it is. What, not satisfied?"

Eiro looked at the woman in front of him, noticing that she was clearly lying to him. Though, that was fine. Eiro didn't expect them to reveal all of their secrets to him; expecting something like that was completely ridiculous in the first place. There really wasn't any need to do so either.

Eiro didn't want to tell the masters directly yet, but what he was planning on doing was not to just copy them.

He was going to use their techniques as a basis for his own. Eiro was a greedy demon, though, so he would never let up the chance to steal the techniques of those that have proven to the world that they are the peak of their particular specialties.

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And so, since Eiro didn't have the time to indulge in the sort of training that was needed for him to come up with his own techniques from scratch, he would rather just take aspects from tried and true techniques like these and use those as a starting point.

For example, he already regularly mixed Orion and Kassandra's techniques, so what would happen if he tried to mix Orion's dagger mastery with Kassandra's life force techniques, or vice versa. Of course, that wouldn't go over perfectly smotohly, but Eiro should have a good enough understanding of these techniques to adjust everything properly.

And not just that, but now that he understood the concept of changing the qualities of your life force like this, a whole new world had opened up to him. Once he had access to other pure elements, he could use those as a base to form new techniques for himself. Either way, he could use the methods of the masters as the best possible starting point he could ever ask for.

"Okay, now," Kassandra crossed her arms and looked at the demon, once again tapping her foot on the ground impatiently, as if she wanted this all to be over as soon as possible, "Let's actually see you use those life force patterns in action. First, use 'Low Heat' with the basic defensive stance.

Eiro quickly nodded his head, adjusting his life force in the way that Kassandra had shown him earlier. He wasn't able to do it quite at the same speed that she was able to, but he was still pretty quick at it.

Once he reached a point he was satisfied with, Eiro quickly took on the basic defensive stance, lowering his center of gravity ever so slightly while holding his right palm forward as his left was pressed onto his back. Since it was easier to train like this, Eiro had fused his arms together instead of leaving them split apart into four.

Eiro inspected his own body. What he was noticing was actually quite surreal. As soon as he entered this position, it was like his body and life force were interacting with each other in a unique way.

As if the 'low heat' life force was flowing in all the right ways to make this stance as effective as it could be, while his body was in turn in the right position for the different areas of his body to cause the heat to intermingle with itself in all the needed points. Of course, that made sense; this life force pattern was clearly created by Kassandra using a lot of practice and fine-tuning.

Her techniques were precise, like fine-tuning one's own instincts into an even flow of motions. That wasn't possible without spending a lot of time on refining your techniques into the best state they could be.

"Hm... alright, just defend for now," Kassandra said, stretching lightly as she took on the basic offensive stance, quickly closing the gap between herself and Eiro. The demon was barely able to react in time before Kassandra struck him. However, as if his body reacted on his own, like the flames that were his life force reacted to the attack before he himself could, Eiro was prompted to defend.

And defend he did.

Kassandra struck at him a few more times, but he managed to successfully defend.

"That's good enough for now. Next, the heavy defensive stance," Kassandra instructed, and Eiro quickly nodded his head, doing as he was told.