Demon's Virtue

Jess stared at Eiro with a confused expression. After all, just having something like that unloaded onto her all of a sudden really wasn't something you could prepare for.

She took half a step forward and stared into Eiro's eyes, before letting her sight wander down onto the small, black piece of wood that Eiro was holding, "That's... That's a joke, right? You can't be serious... You being around Avalin is that dangerous? Wood from a tree that grew out of a fallen angel's corpse? This whole situation is just so... so..."

"Ridiculous? Yeah, I know what you mean. I've been thinking the same thing for a good while now." The Demon pointed out with a light, awkward smile on his face, but Jess just looked down at the ground with a light frown on her face, "More than that, it's... unfair. Why do you need some kind of legendary item just so that you can be around your very own daughter? You treat her so well, but you would die from doing so without the intervention of a literal Unholy Artifact? What's with that?"

"As I said, I've been thinking the same thing for a good while now. It is how it is, and I can't change anything about it. Well, except if Holy Energy just suddenly stops being my Bane, I guess. At that point, it'll be fine. But before then, there's nothing we can do about it." Eiro told Jess, "And I say 'before then', but both of us know that something like that is never going to happen in the first place."

"But..." Jess started, but Eiro looked back at her with a smile on his face. He pushed himself off the wall and started to walk down the hallway, placing his hand onto Jess' head for just a moment as he was doing so, "It's fine. I've known about this for years now, there's no way I wouldn't be prepared for it."

Eiro walked past Jess, and the conversation between them ended. Simply because he didn't want to discuss something like this any longer. It's not like he didn't already have all the thoughts that Jess was having right now.

It's not like he didn't try and figure out any possible way to reverse this, or just nullify his fatal weakness to holy energy.

But it was also fact that his Holy Energy resistance skill simply hasn't been rising anymore lately. Maybe once a month or something, and the only way that Eiro could keep it advancing into higher levels was by literally destroying his body. That was the fatal weakness of the skills that were supposed to get rid of such weaknesses. You couldn't level them up without exposing yourself to them.

And resistance skills against someone's bane were so rare that many thought they were impossible to get in the first place. After all, usually, a being wouldn't survive long enough to be able to unlock a resistance skill against a Bane. Eiro was just a lucky case.

Or rather, he was a freak in every sense of the word. Eiro stepped further down the hallway and looked down at the back of his hand as it was still healing a bit right now. His health didn't recover yet, like normal, but at the very least this rapid mass-healing was something quite convenient.

But either way, for now, Eiro had to get the last piece of his plan that was meant to be a trump-card against the Collector, and if possible, against [The Death] himself.

Eiro made his way into the hidden library and opened one of the boxes that he had placed down on one of the tables here in preparation for this. Eiro opened the box and pulled out the small leather pouch, before pouring the contents down onto the table.

Small, white-yellow bones poured out of the bag, and Eiro took a deep breath as different figures appeared around him. For one, Nelli and Gondos, who were always watching what Eiro was up to, but also Bavet and Gobo wanted to see what exactly Eiro was doing here.

"Wait, whose bones are those?" Bavet asked, immediately recognizing the small pieces for what they are, and Gobo slightly tilted his head to the side, "A snack for thinking?"

Eiro sighed and shook his head immediately, "No, they're my own bones. When Jura removed my hand, he kept the bones for me to keep and do whatever I want with. And the thing that I want to do with it right now is..." The Demon grabbed another set of items that he put down here on the table before. He placed some of the bones into the bowl that was part of that small set, before crushing them up into a fine powder, "...this."

It seemed like both Nelli and Gondos understood what Eiro wanted to do with these immediately, considering that they just watched the demonstration of the effect that Avalin's blood had on Eiro.

When Holy Energy came in contact with a Demon's skin, flesh, blood, or bones, literally anything that was part of a demon's body, it would try and ignite Sacred White Flames, and in the process just burnt away everything before those flames could appear. But in a case where a high concentration of Holy Energy hit a Demon, it would simply go up in flames, whose potency was far more wild and concentrated than the Holy Energy that ignited it. The Sacred Flames would end up burning the Unholy mass that was a demon's body and use it as fuel to create Holy Energy out of basically nowhere.

Well, that was at least at the start of it. After the Sacred Flames were ignited, while their nature was certainly that of something Holy... They were still flames.

Eiro pinched a little bit of the bone-powder in front of him and placed it down on a flat surface away from all the other bone-bits so that no accident could happen.

Then, Eiro pulled out the bottle filled with Avalin's flames and carefully opened it up. He took another small drop of the blood and placed it directly onto the ground-down demon-bones.

Nearly immediately, they ignited, creating the Sacred Flames out of Eiro's ground-down bones. Slowly, he created a string of mana and detached it from his body itself, just to see what would happen. He moved it up to the flames, and immediately, Eiro's mana ignited and started to burn. It was exactly like Eiro thought.

Not only the physical parts of a demon's body were susceptible to this kind of effect, but so was their mana. And now that the Sacred Flames were using Eiro's mana as their fuel, there was practically no difference to regular Fire Magic.

Slowly, and far more carefully than normal, Eiro started to feed more mana to the white flames in front of him as he used the black wood to extinguish the flame that was created with the bone-powder.

And then, Eiro proceeded to do a regular, basic fire-magic practice using flames that were capable of killing him close to instantly.

"Wait, how does that even work? If your mana is also vulnerable to Holy Energy, how were you able to even control Avalin's blood with Magic?" Gondos asked. It seemed like he was quite curious about this, and having this sort of knowledge was important for especially young Spirits, so Nelli took over and quickly explained.

"Well, it's simple. Eiro's mana doesn't have enough traces of his demonic nature in it to cause that ignition effect on its own. Maybe if Avalin was at her peak in power and actively fought against Eiro, then maybe it would be possible, but not like this. However, when the flame is already ignited, it's like a mixture of Holy Energy and Fire Magic, so it can use Eiro's mana as fuel since it still has those miniscule traces of his demonic nature in it. As simple as that."

"Ah... I see. That is something I should remember, then. Thank you, Nelli." Gondos replied to Nelli as he turned away from her and looked back at the Sacred Flames that Eiro was somewhat nervously controlling right now.

"That's kind of weird, isn't it? Turning your own bane into a weapon in the indirect sense that I thought you had planned before, using special gloves and such, but actively doing it like that? Can't you just... cast spells using it if that's the case?"

"That's the plan, at least. If I had more time, I would have tried my hands at something else... but I don't know if I have that time right now, so I'll have to use this way instead." Eiro explained, "Seriously though, why did this kind of enemy have to come NOW of all times? Guess it's a good practice for him..."

"Him?" Gobo asked confusedly. Since he still had a bit of a struggle with understanding object permanence to the fullest, it seemed like he thought that Eiro was speaking about one of the people here in this room or the manor. Eiro turned around toward him and just nodded his head.

"[The Devil]. Who else? You know, I didn't come up with this plan for [The Death] or the Collector, but for him. But since I don't have access to anything else right now that I could use against the Collector in particular, I had to pull this plan to the front. I just hope that [The Devil] doesn't see through it... But well, by the time I'll be able to face him, the thing I want to make should be finished."

The Demon pointed out before he slowly started to pack the bone-powder into small packs that he made with some cloth, so that he could make them practically 'explode' into Sacred Flames whenever he needed to. But he didn't say much more about that thing that Eiro wanted to make in order to kill [The Devil], and it wasn't anything that anyone had heard about yet. Not even Nelli and Gondos knew about it yet. So, they stood behind the demon and looked at him intensely.

Eiro sighed lightly and turned around. "What?"

"Well, won't you tell us?"

"Tell you what, Nelli?"

"What you wanted to make to kill [The Devil]!"

With a slight sigh, Eiro stood up and walked to the other side of the room, still trying to keep the sacred flames lit passively a bit of a distance away from him to practice his control over it, since it was still a bit different to regular fire magic. And then, the Demon opened a closet that random objects were placed in, and he pulled out a specific orb.

It was a surprising sight, but what was inside of the completely airtight glass orb was a floating sphere, and Eiro announced this part of his plan.

"I wanted to get into Artificing so that I could create a flame like this that constantly burns. Just that the flame in that case would be a Sacred Flame, so that I always have access to it when I need it."