Demon's Virtue

633 Three in One

Eiro and Shimour ran at each other, and the Demon quickly swung his first dagger at the mountainous man in front of him. After seeing what those daggers could do just to a cloud of dust, obviously Shimour didn’t simply take it and dodged out of the way. Or rather, it was only similar to that. Eiro thought for sure that he had managed to hit Shimour, but as soon as he didn’t feel any resistance in his arms, he realized that this wasn’t the case in the slightest.

Shimour was actually still about half a foot away, he simply made it seem as though he was closer than he was. This was ridiculously disorienting to Eiro. Since Jura’s death, the one thing that Eiro knew he could trust in was his own senses; but now, in this fight, even that wasn’t the case anymore. Weirdly enough, it caused a similar reaction to when Eiro first heard the Overseer of the Tower of Books speak the content of a full book in a single sound. It was as if his mind was short-circuited for a moment. Rather, all of his minds reacted in the same way, and he blanked out for just an instant, before soon managing to recover himself.

‘An advanced application of stealth, huh...’ Eiro thought to himself. In theory, it was possible, of course. If Stealth allowed you to completely hide yourself, then it should also be possible to simply change the way you appeared to others. In this case, Shimour made it appear as though he was half a foot further forward, but in other cases... it should very well be possible for someone like Shimour to disguise himself as a completely different person.

It wasn’t as defined as illusion magic, of course. Illusion magic required the user to create a detailed, false image. But this sort of stealth-based illusion didn’t technically change anything about Shimour, instead, it changed the way that the target looked at Shimour. It was an important distinction, of course, and Eiro was trying his hardest to take advantage of it.

In the latter method of illusion, it was likely that every single target would see something slightly different. Shimour placed an ‘idea’ of something into their mind, and their mind automatically changed the world around them into what they think ‘should’ be the case. But such perception is different for different individuals. If they think differently, or if they’re distracted, or even just if they’re in a bad mood, things will be ever-so-slightly different.

Luckily, Eiro was perfectly equipped to go against this. His regular mental duplicates thought exactly the same as him, since they didn’t have much of a personality. It wasn’t needed, so Eiro didn’t give them one. That’s why they were mostly just extensions of Eiro’s own personality and thoughts, they adjusted themselves completely to himself, so they didn’t drift into thoughts that Eiro himself wouldn’t. On the other hand, he did have two duplicates that were slowly but surely changing away from what he, the original, was.

“I’m a little busy, but sure.” – “How annoying...” the two duplicates reacted like that, and quickly meditated inwardly to concentrate on the original properly. Quickly, Eiro manipulated his eye; the one that didn’t already have the mirror placed inside of it. It would be too risky to use that one for such a thing. No, he instead duplicated his other eye twice, and quickly fused the three together. Since he had quite the control over flesh magic now, this was a surprisingly easy job.

Now, Eiro had three irises and pupils sharing the space in his eye. His regular one, coloured in a cool, frosty gray. Beside that one, there was the deep red of the duplicate in the plane of fire, and the strong blue of the duplicate in the plane of water. Using the link of the gateways within Eiro’s soul, and the innate connection of their minds, the duplicates now saw completely through the original’s left eye.

It was the same view of the same world, just seen through three consciousnesses.

.....

It took only a single second to set this all up, but in that second, Eiro had a fierce exchange with Shimour. No matter how often Eiro swung at him, whether it was with his daggers or his two free fists, none of his attacks connected. Sometimes it was because Shimour kept using that same trick, and other times just because Shimour was able to dodge out of the way. Of course, Eiro wasn’t hit by any of Shimour’s attacks either.

While he was lacking in skill, Eiro’s incredible control over ‘Truth and Order’ allowed him to foresee everything that Shimour might want to do, and his raw physical abilities allowed him to react however he needed to, albeit just barely.

Neither of them managed to hit the other even once, that was until Eiro’s eye had fully formed and he had a new view of the world. Shimour approached him, swinging his arm for an attack, but quickly Eiro saw something amiss. Some of the hairs on Shimour’s arm were different across his three views. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to show that this was a trick by Shimour, something that Eiro could be confident in. There was nothing wrong with the rest of Shimour’s body, though, so he had only changed Eiro’s perception of that arm. From the way Shimour held his body there was only a limited amount of things he could do. He was basically doing the same thing that the ‘fake’ Shimour was doing, just that the blade of his knife was a few inches lower.

The Demon grabbed a hold of Shimour’s arm, creating physical contact between the two for the first time since that first encounter earlier. Eiro tightened his grasp as much as he could while pulling Shimour toward himself. Shimour’s mere weight made it so that he was practically pulling himself toward Shimour, though that was something easily fixed with some gravity magic to make his own body heavier.

Eiro quickly stabbed his dagger at the mountainous man, but before he knew it, Shimour had already twisted out of the way. In a rather ludicrous way too.

Eiro was able to do it, but that was only because he specifically trained his body to be able to do so, which even then was only possible during evolutions when every fiber of his physical being was reconstructed. But Shimour did it anyway; with just a flex of his muscles, he popped his joints out of their sockets, and nonetheless managed to control his muscles to move his body how he wanted. And it wasn’t just his legs or shoulders, even his wrist and hand. Every single joint on Shimour’s fingers came loose, as his body seemed to practically become a liquid and slip out of Eiro’s grasp.

The Demon stood there for a moment looking at Shimour’s body. He looked as though someone had violently disfigured him, breaking every single one of his bones. But no, as quickly as he managed to escape, Shimour’s body corrected itself, looking as though nothing was ever wrong to begin with.

“You’re really a ridiculous guy, aren’t you..?” Eiro muttered with a wry smile, but Shimour simply scoffed, “Says you! The hell’d you do with your eye there, huh?”

“...Just a small trick to catch up to you, I guess.”

“Got any more of those kindsa tricks? This is getting even more fun than I thought,” Shimour laughed, and a grin formed on Eiro’s face. A grin that tore into his cheeks, until his mouth opened up, letting him grin literally from ear to ear, before his skin underneath his nose fused back together.

“How about this?” he asked in two voices, and Shimour nodded, “That’s what you were doing earlier, right? I wondered what the use of that was.”

Immediately, Eiro showed exactly how this was useful. There are certain spells so complicated and taxing on the user that it was near impossible to cast them without chanting. Of course, another step above that were spells that required more than one individual to cast them, where both would construct part of the spell and chant at the same time.

In particular, there was one spell that Eiro found in the Fire Tower of Books that described exactly this kind of thing. It was a ‘Physical Boost’ spell cast through the fire element as a conduit. Of course, Eiro was in the midst of analyzing it to simplify it, so that he could use it without having to do this, but it was an incredibly, incredibly old spell, using methods that were still foreign to Eiro. Even the way of chanting was new. Instead of pleading to the spirits, it was a duet of poems that were recited to ask a favor of them.

With both of his mouths, Eiro started to recite the poems, starting to construct the magic circle right on top of his own skin. It was a tough one, certainly; it was as though he was carving the spell into his own skin, which was one of the reasons why it was hidden on the second floor of the tower instead of being openly available on the first, on top of its age and rarity of course. It was supposed to be a permanent body strengthening ritual, but for someone like Eiro who could regenerate his body at will, it was nothing else beside scribbles done with paint.

The moment the words started escaping his mouth, Shimour started to realize that something big was about to happen. It was exactly what he wanted, but his instincts still screamed at him that he had to stop Eiro from doing this by all means. Because if he finished, then Shimour’s defeat was as well as determined.

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