Chapter 283: Eye Candy
Belladonna gathered up all of the corpses, at least the ones she hadn’t punted into the next state, into one pile before sitting down to start to butcher them. The rest of the party did not mind the delay, as it gave them a chance to sit down themselves, and enter a light meditation so that they could use the mana filled air of the dungeon to recharge what they lost.
Well... All of the party except for one.
"Watcha’ doin’ now?" Lilith asked with a sweet smile, leaning over Belladonna’s shoulder and casting multiple shadows over her work with that massive, muscle bound body, all thanks to each lava pool acting as a different light source to create shadows.
Belladonna glanced at her, before shaking her head and laughing. She wanted to be annoyed at the interruption, but she couldn’t find it in her. For one, Lilith’s smile was just too sweet.
Despite her massive, muscular stature and hellish armour, she was a true kitten inside unlike her fiance that simply pretended to be one despite clearly being a fox. Plus, she was showing genuine interest, which was always nice, and it’s not like she could be blamed for being bored.
Lilith was the only one here that didn’t need to recharge like this, as she did not use mana at all.
Although she could do magic, in a sense, her system relied on something different than mana. Much like Percy used Providence, and the conviction to his oath, to power himself, Lilith used something called Aura, which was exclusive to the Hellion race.
It came from everything she killed, as well as the perception of others. It was a rather difficult class to build up, if you didn’t have the right mindset or determination for slaughter. But that was only in the beginning, when you were weak and could not build much aura, only building up what you could from weak creatures.
Once you grow strong enough, your aura would quite literally farm itself. People would know your strength, the rumours would spread and as they did you would grow stronger, which would feed into the rumours more, which would then feed your strength more and so on and so forth.
It was an amazing feedback loop, to the point that one player - ’TrytoSoloMe’ - had focused entirely in defence, and was spending a lot of his days letting people hit him with their strongest attacks, just to test his defence. Every time they failed to crack his shell, he would grow stronger. The only downside was when someone eventually came along who could defeat him, it would suddenly end his growth strategy.
"I’m taking out the eyeballs," Belladonna explained, giving a demonstration alongside it, as she scooped her dagger behind the eyeball. She severed the optic nerve before prying the eye out and letting it flop to the side.
"That gives me an easier view inside, where I am searching for any Source Remnants. They are usually between the lungs... but I have no idea where the lungs are in this thing, or if it even has any. This thing’s biology is just so... demonic, I guess." She said with a sigh, stabbing her knife into it and hacking away in annoyance, before dropping the body and starting to cut off the horns.
"Failing that, we take these, since they are good loot." Belladonna finished, turning her head away from her work to smile at Lilith. However the Demoness was no longer standing over her, and was instead sitting next to her, dagger in hand, as she followed Belladonna’s instructions for the harvest. Although even sitting there, she was still managing to cast a shadow, which Belladonna had to laugh at.
They talked idly between each other, discussing nothing of real importance, and simply enjoying each other’s company as they worked. However, even after getting 15 Eye-Spies deep, they still hadn’t found any Source Remnant, although that didn’t mean they found nothing.
When Lilith was pulling out one of the eyeballs, she jostled the body in such a way that the pupil of the eyeball simply fell out. It clattered against the ground, somehow popping out as a solid, fully black golf-ball sized orb that left a cavity in the jelly eyeball as the strange little orb bounced and rolled across the ground before coming to a stop against Belladonna’s leg.
Stranger than that, it was hot to the touch, despite the themselves bodies being cold.
Turning her hand to ice, Belladonna plucked up the orb curiously and gave it a cautionary sniff. On the thought that this could be the Source Remnant, she dragged her tongue across the odd orb, only to immediately recoil in disgust.
It was sour, dreadfully so. Like an entire orchard of lemons had been compressed into a single gobstopper.
"What is it?" Lilith asked, scootching forwards and leaning on her knees, her eyes wide as Belladonna’s face scrunched up from the taste of the orb.
"I have no idea," She managed to say, after regaining control of her face, "but it is not a Source Remnant."
Lilith frowned softly, looking at it with a strange expression and tilting her head, before plucking it from Belladonna’s hand. She did not seem too bothered by the heat it emitted, as she quickly brought it up to her own mouth and tossed it in whole.
She swirled it around, letting out a hum of delight at the taste, before it cracked in her mouth and rapidly melted. Her aura suddenly surged, the black flames flaring out from her skin pores and wrapping around her body, as it compressed itself tighter.
Sticking close to Lilith’s body, the aura grew ever so slightly darker and felt ever so slightly more oppressive. Not just that, but Belladonna could swear that, in the way the flames danced and moved, that she could see the shape of a face with a singular eye wailing in perpetual agony.
"Apparently," Lilith said, her eyes darting back and forth over the barrage of notifications appearing before her,
"That was something called ’Essence of Sin’, and I can use it to grow stronger."
The two women looked at each other, sharing a knowing gaze as they broke out into wide, manic smiles, before they simultaneously dove into the pile of bodies once again. Without exchanging a word, they both started to tear into the eyes they had previously discarded, searching for any more of the ’Essence of Sin’.
It didn’t take long before Belladonna thrust her hand into the air, with a solid black golf ball held tight in her icy grasp.
