Demon's Virtue

"To your left. And James, right ahead." Eiro said with a somewhat annoyed expression as he kept warning his party-members because of the acid-projectiles being shot at them. Whenever one of those plant-type monsters that were growing along this bridge were shooting at them, Eiro shot back and killed them rather easily and quickly. But there were just so many of them that even this Demon wasn't able to kill them all at once. But he was reducing their numbers, at least.

"Can't you just make a fucking barrier or somethin'? It feels like the bridge is gonna collapse sooner or later because of this stuff..." Krog complained loudly, and Eiro shrugged, "A barrier would be too bothersome. I'll just keep using Rock Bullet instead."

It didn't take too much longer until Eiro had killed nearly all of them without a problem. And then, one of the last couple of them shot one of those projectiles, a particularly large one, directly at Eiro. The Demon held his hand forward and proceeded to use a magic that he currently didn't have too much control over, even though it was one that he had technically used for quite a while already.

The projectile ended up slowing down right in front of Eiro, until it came to a halt right in front of his hand. The Demon then encapsuled it in an orb of ice, which was when the projectile popped again. Eiro opened up a tiny hole inside of the ice orb and let a small drop of the acid touch his skin.

It immediately felt like it was burning him, but it wasn't that bad. It didn't even make Eiro bleed. But even so, it was still an incredibly potent sort of acid... So of course, Eiro chose to keep it. He poured the rest of the acid into a glass bottle that he then safely placed into his treasury, where it couldn't shatter apart. He would try and analyze it a bit more later so that he could possibly replicate it, at least to an extent. If he made a more potent version of that right now inside of his stinger, he would probably cause his tail to melt apart because of it.

"Gravity magic is really useful, isn't it..?" Jess said with a jealous expression, and Eiro looked back at her with a light smile, "Yeah, it is. I'm glad that I was able to finally awaken to the skill, so I don't need to use all the magic stones anymore. Instead, I can have Armodeus make some great items with them for us instead."

"You're really just using Armodeus as your personal item dispensary, huh?" James pointed out with a grin, but Eiro just shrugged, "I don't know what you mean. I pay him for every item he makes for me and I pay for all the materials that he uses even for his own projects. It's not like I'm 'using him' or anything like that."

He held his hand forward, and shot a few more Rock Bullets at the rest of the plant-monsters, causing them all to die. There were a few more on the underside of the bridge further ahead, but it wasn't like those were going to be any sort of issue. They couldn't really move, after all, and they wouldn't end up melting away the parts of the bridge they were hanging on. Instead, while the group walked over them, they were trying to be as quiet and inanimate as possible, so that they wouldn't die like the others of their kind.

But it wasn't like Eiro would let them live anyway. Although, he still brought their corpses with him, so that he could harvest their seeds and grow some of them on his own at some point. These plant-type monsters had an incredibly subtle ego, and they were mostly controlled by the most raw and basic of instincts brought upon by their monstrosity. So if Eiro manipulated them properly as he grew them so that they didn't have any, or simply far too little, monstrosity to begin with, they should be incredibly easy to control. They should be great if Eiro stationed them as defensive units around the border of his manor.

But for now, Eiro just threw all of their corpses onto one spot. They had to go kill the city guard first anyway. It stood there, a large Troll with a thick stone pillar as its weapon. It glared down at the party, saying some gibberish in troll-speech.

"Do you three want to take care of it?" Eiro asked, looking at his party members, "It would be a good chance for me to harvest the seeds from these guys already."

Krog, Jess and James looked at each other for a moment, before they soon nodded their heads, "Let's do it like that." James concluded, "But you better hurry up, cause this won't take long."

Eiro grinned a bit as he approached the pile of the bodies behind him again. He sat down there, grabbing the bodies one by one before he started going through them. The only issue was that their bodies were naturally giving off that same acid as before, even if it was somewhat weaker than earlier.

He definitely wouldn't be able to use his metal tools for it, otherwise they would end up rusting away practically immediately. So instead, Eiro swiftly started constructing a magic circle to create some Arcane Tools so that he could properly extract everything from their bodies. After all, pure mana obviously couldn't be affected by things like acid. And so, after Eiro created them, he fused them with his Three of Swords' blades, something that gave Eiro more fine-tuned control than just through the regular magical tools.

And while Eiro was doing that, the others were at work fighting that Troll. For Eiro, it would be easy to kill that thing instantly, since Eiro was able to cause a lot of different sorts of damage. Among them, he was able to keep on 'pressing' damage onto the opponent, something that came in incredibly useful against Trolls. Their regenerative ability was incredibly impressive even for the base-race, and this one particularly so.

Even though it was clearly only a Baron-Level Noble Monster, its regenerative ability was dialed up by quite a bit. When James tried stabbing it, if he wasn't quick enough, the wound would end up closing around his dagger and he would get tripped up when trying to pull it back out.

If one of Krog's heavy attacks broke its bones, they healed immediately. And when Jess tried burning its flesh, it barely even started bleeding. They needed to figure out how they could do a lot of damage over a longer period of time. Or if they couldn't do that, they needed to figure out a way to kill it instantly. But the Troll didn't give them the time to just think about a plan like that, another advantage that Eiro himself would have.

One idea they had was to simply keep on attacking it. When a Troll healed damage done to its body, it healed 100% of its physical damage, and maybe around, at most, 70 to 75% of damage to their health points. They didn't instantly reccover all of their actual health, and the less health a Troll had, the slower their overall regenerative ability became.

Jess figured that this troll was probably able to recover about 90% of its health instead of the regular amount, if not more. It certainly was impossible for it to recover 100%, that simply wouldn't make sense. That meant that as long as they ended up dealing more and more damage to it over time, the Troll's regeneration would eventually slow down to a point where they were able to deal actual damage to its physical body.

And that is exactly what they tried to do for now. Overall, the Troll wasn't that powerful. It wasn't particularly strong, so much so that Krog was able to keep up with it in a feat of strength, it wasn't fast enough to catch James, and it wasn't smart enough to react to the three of them together.

It was clearly overwhelmed, having evolved just for its superior regeneration.

For about ten minutes, this fight dragged on and on. At this point, other monsters were coming to this place as well. And that was when Eiro chose to gave them a bit of a tip...

"You know you don't actually have to kill it, right?" The Demon pointed out, and immediately, the three of them froze up. Krog and James were confused, but Jess quickly caught on, and groaned loudly as she became embarrassed that she didn't think of it earlier herself.

She started casting a spell, and soon shot a powerful, strong blast of wind onto the side of the Troll, pushing it to the edge of the bridge.

"Krog, could you..?" She asked, and Krog's confused expression turned sour immediately, "Urgh... Come on now..."

Krog ran up to the Troll and attacked it once more, crushing its hand so that it couldn't swing the huge pillar it was holding for a few moments, and then grabbed its whole body. He pushed the Troll over the edge of the bridge, and watched as it approached the surface of the water. This island was probably floating more than just a few hundred meters high... the impact itself might be enough to fatally injure the troll, and then there were the water-born monsters swimming down there that would then deal with it.

"Seriously? We could have just done that the whole time?" James asked with a wry smile, and Eiro bluntly shrugged, "Of course. Just fight smart."