Chapter 3: Judgement
In the middle of his trance, Blake didn’t even realize it when he muttered,
“That shit is a work of art...” out loud.
His voice soon alerted the devilishly beautiful girl that was playing around with the six burly wolves.
“Who’s there!?” She shouted while turning her head towards Blake’s direction.
‘Oh shit.’ Blake cursed inwardly.
But his survival instinct quickly kicked in and he opened his mouth once again,
“Your magic is a work of art, beautiful miss!”
.....
Not expecting a reply, the demoness froze as she stared at the demon some distance away from her.
She was shocked at first as she prepared to cast more spells to attack the unknown demon that had just suddenly appeared out of nowhere. In the forest where she was currently in, there was a very low chance of meeting a humanoid demon that was intelligent enough to speak fluently as most of the demons in the forest were demonic beasts that didn’t have the ability to speak yet.
And a humanoid demon that was also able to speak was one of the clear signs that it was a strong demon that had evolved multiple times. So it was only normal when the demoness quickly prepared her spells before the unknown demon attacked her first.
But when she saw the terrified look on the humanoid demon’s face when she was drawing her runes, she abruptly stopped moving her hands and took a better look at the unknown humanoid demon in front of her.
The humanoid demon had skin as dark as his hair, with two horns as small as herself on his forehead, an average height with a mid-sized build, and a well-proportioned face that could be considered attractive. She tried looking at his back and she found the humanoid demon didn’t have any wings on his back, which was odd, considering most highly evolved demons such as herself have wings on their backs, particularly the humanoid ones.
Due to some of her circumstances, she was currently hiding in a forest where relatively weak demons lived and there was not a single demon there that could threaten her, and a humanoid demon was something that she shouldn’t meet in any parts of the forest.
But when she finally realized that the humanoid demon in front of her didn’t have any aura emitting from his body nor did she feel any danger from him, she relaxed her guard a little, but she kept her eyes glued on him.
‘His current existence screamed to me that he wasn’t a highly evolved demon... But just to be sure..’
The demoness then snapped her fingers, and at that moment, the tendrils of darkness that stabbed the wolves had all suddenly disappeared into thin air as if they had never existed in the first place, but the bloody holes on the wolves’ bodies and the 4 wolves that were lying lifelessly on the ground were more than enough evidence that those tendrils of darkness existed just a second ago.
Seeing all this, Blake was confused and he stood in place, wondering what he had to do now that the beautiful demoness in front of him had suddenly ignored him.
He was about to speak again and ask the demoness her name when he suddenly heard two growls coming from behind the demoness’s body.
Blake then turned his head towards the source of the sound only to find two of the six cow-sized wolves stood up from the ground and they were currently glaring daggers toward his and the demoness’ direction.
“Umm... Beautiful miss, I think you need to cast a couple more spells to take them down?” He spoke while rapidly looking back and forth between the wolves and the demoness.
But Blake was beyond startled when he saw the demoness suddenly open up her wings and started flying off the ground.
It took him a few seconds to understand what happened, but then he quickly asked, “Miss? What are you do-”
But his question was cut off midway as he heard the growls again, and with the demoness now floating high up in the air, the two wolves’ attention was solely focused on him, and their eyes were still staring daggers while looking at him as if he was the one that had been stabbing tendrils of darkness into their body.
His mind began to churn as he thought about whether the wolves were also able to understand what he was saying and if it was possible to talk his way out of the situation since he couldn’t even imagine himself fighting against those cow-sized wolves with his small body.
But before he was able to make any decision, the wolves made the decision for him as they started chasing after him with their battered bodies, gunning straight toward Blake as if he had killed their families.
‘I’m fcked.’ He cursed inwardly before turning his body 180 degrees and started running for his life as the two wolves trailed behind him.
Blake didn’t notice this before, but now that he was exerting all of his power to run away, he felt his body was way lighter than before and he was able to run about twice as fast as his speed before.
But the wolves that were following weren’t slow either as the forest was their home ground, and if not for the fact that there were countless wounds on their bodies from the demoness’ attacks earlier, they would have already caught up to Blake as even he could hear their feet kicking off the ground not too far away from his current location despite his speed was way faster than before.
‘I can’t let this continue. I can’t just run away forever from them...’ Blake thought as he purposely ran in an exact pattern that he found in a book somewhere that would make it harder for the quadruped creatures to follow his movements.
Blake then searched in the library of his mind for knowledge that he might be able to use to come out of the dangerous situation that he was currently in.
With his academic ability, he was attending a considerably good high school with a scholarship, but his inability to use mana had become a wall for him to get the top of the top high school where they had more detailed knowledge about mana usage and about the demons that they could find in the world behind the gate. And now with his current high school, Blake was only stuck with very general knowledge regarding the demons and their characteristics and traits.
He tried to think of the strength and weaknesses of the demons that he might know of, but since there were so many different types of them, the book didn’t even specify anything about their weakness. The only thing that the book mentioned all demons had in common was the fact that they didn’t use mana, instead, they used something called the nether to cast their spells instead.
“Wait...” Blake suddenly muttered.
“Since now I am also a demon, does that mean that...”
Blake didn’t even finish his words as he abruptly went quiet and focused on the inside of his body.
He then felt his heartbeat which was now beating hard as he kept moving his legs as fast as he could to run away from the wolves. But when he focused even more on his body, Blake finally found something foreign that he had never felt before in his body.
It also stemmed from his heart as he could feel it overflowing from the same place where his heart was currently beating.
‘Is this... Nether?’
He knew that it couldn’t be mana since he could never use it and even the mana measuring equipment even stated that he had 0 mana in his body.
‘It must be nether...’
From the textbook, Blake knew that different from the humans and other creatures that had to chant if they wanted to use mana to cast spells, the demons used runes instead to cast their spells. By drawing runes using nether, the nether would manifest themselves into different demonic spells.
‘But how do I do it? I don’t know any demonic rune-‘
‘Wait, I know a few of them.’
Blake abruptly stopped moving as he turned his body again, this time to face the wolves straight from the front.
The wolves who were some distance away from him due to Blake’s moving pattern were alerted by Blake’s sudden change in behavior and they also stopped moving as they watched Blake warily.
There wasn’t any explanation in the textbook about how to move nether, but ever since he found the source of nether in his body, Blake felt a familiar feeling from it that told him how to manipulate those nether to move from his heart to create the demonic runes.
Without even closing his eyes, Blake used his photographic memory to recall the demoness’ hand movements that he had seen earlier and copy her exact hand movement using his own hands while commanding the nether in his body to flow out of his hands and draw out the demonic runes.
Blake’s hand movements were so exact and precise that he didn’t even need a second try as he created his first ever demonic rune using his own hands.
The completed rune stayed floating in the air for a split second before suddenly the same tendrils of darkness that the demoness had used earlier appeared from the ground beneath one of the wolves’ feet and started stabbing its body once again, pinning the poor wolf onto the ground.
The other wolf still remembered the feeling of those tendrils of darkness stabbing his body all over from head to tail and seeing it once again torturing one of its kin awakened the trauma that it had earlier, causing the wolf to flinch and froze in its spot.
But the wolves were pack animals, and even with the fear in its heart, abandoning one of their kin was not an option for them. So the wolf gritted its teeth as it drove away the fear in its body and focused its hatred on the little demon in front of it.
The wolf was about to kick its feet off the ground and pounce on the humanoid demon. However, before the wolf could even move its leg, the humanoid demon once again drew the similar runes in the air, and this time, the demon did it even faster than before, completing the demonic rune in only a full second.
And when the completed rune once again formed and disappeared, the other wolf suffered the same fate as the first wolf as there were now two wolves that had their bodies pinned down to the ground by tendrils of darkness, unable to do anything except for waiting for Blake’s judgement.
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