"It could turn out to be a wild goose chase, you know?"
"But it could also turn out to NOT be one."
Pride nodded after a moment and decided to follow the young hero on his search, with the two of them going behind the large earth-magic-constructed wall where the majority of the combatants who participated in the earlier battle against Vazgan's army were resting.
On a side note, Guild Master Dasyra, and some of the military officers returned to the battlefield to help clear out the droves of level 150 to 200 undead knights that the Eighth Finger was constantly summoning.
Evan sent a few messages to Kuro and Kayla who were with Eliza, before activating his concealment on him and Pride and running up into the air with Void steps.
The duo occasionally descended near areas where a large number of people were clustered but each time Pride shook her head indicating there were no demons in the vicinity.
It took them more than 15 minutes to scour even a quarter of the area as the sheer number of combatants present easily exceeded fifteen thousand.
They were basically searching for two people, among fifteen thousand plus people, it naturally was not going to be easy at all.
Pride considered sending out a wave of demonic energy to probe for the demon, but decided against it as that would simply cause chaos among the level 200+ people present who would definitely sense her energy.
The only good part about this so far was that they had been able to detect more than two dozen corpse puppets loaded with plastic explosives, tar and liquified demonic energy that had mixed themselves up among the large groups of people.
If Methik simultaneously detonated all those corpses, then the death toll would easily exceed a thousand, and those were just from the corpse puppets they had found.
Evan tossed one more corpse puppet into his inventory, thanking his stars that despite being reanimated, they were still considered 'non-living things' and able to be put into his inventory when Pride tapped him on the shoulder and pointed in a certain direction.
Like usual, it was a large group of adventurers gathered around, but the high demon would not have pointed at them if there wasn't anything 'off' about them.
The young hero nodded in response as he went around a tent and deactivated his concealment, taking a hood out of his inventory and tossing it on to cover his shirt before activating his appraisal and walking out on the other side of the tent.
He was now facing the group and could see that they were gathered there to have a priest from the church heal some of their lesser non-infected wounds.
The boy glanced at their faces and appraised them all as he walked towards them, grateful for the fact that there were no grandmaster-level adventurers among them to sense his skill activation.
'I'd take Methik, you'd handle his contracted demon.'
[Giving me the stronger opponent?]
'In my defence, I am only finishing what I started.'
[Hmph.]
Such was the conversation the young hero had with his high demon contractor, a moment before he spotted one of the 'adventurers' who had a half mask covering the upper half of his face.
Adventurers dressed in all sorts of ways, so one wearing a mask was not really something strange, however, the appraisal result of this masked man didn't seem to have 'Adventurer' listed among his titles.
|Name- Methik Ifoumien
Race- Demonic Human
Gender-Male
Age-48
Level-169(270)
Existence Level - Master (Superior)
Titles-Corpse Doll, Senior Member of the Demonic Hand, Corpsemaker, Confidant of the Eighth Finger of the Demonic Hand.
Class - Corpse Manipulator
Health – C+ (B)
Energy - C (B+)
Strength – C (B)
Agility – C+ (B+)
Durability – C+ (B)
Intelligence - C (B+)
Condition- Weakened, Soul Damaged.
Magic Tiers- Darkness Tier 3, Death Tier 2, Water Tier 1.
Skills- Corpse Explosion, [Soul K"f&e0!E(], Corpse Puppetry, [3k&5N1"6].
Unique Skills- Corpsemaker. |
'Well…that was easier than I expected.'
Evan could see the effects of the soul damage he inflicted on Methik by destroying a third of the man's soul, with him losing a third of his levels and one, of his skills completely.
The skill that let him split his soul into fragments was also partially destroyed, leaving him unable to utilize said skill despite the fact it was still 'displayed' on his status board.
Just when Evan was about to call out to the group of adventurers, Methik abruptly stood up and turned around, walking in the opposite direction while mumbling something about the 'line being too long'.
He was fully committed to his act as an injured adventurer, even despite the fact that he was actually running away since his senses told him that Evan was 'suspicious'.
His contracted demon who was nearby also got up and moved in the same direction, keeping a bit of a distance away from him as they moved to a more 'remote' area in the makeshift camp.
After finally getting rid of Evan from his tail, Methik reconvened with his contracted demon and was about to go to another location in the camp, when Evan suddenly appeared behind him and grabbed him by the shoulders, before disappearing once more.
"What-?!"
Naturally, his contracted demon was instantly alarmed by this, but that short moment of shock at the unexpected occurrence was all that the High demon of pride needed to 'phase into existence' behind him and thrust her demonic energy-coated sword through his heart.
"GUH?!"
The low-rank demon coughed out bright red blood as his eyes widened in shock, trying to rouse his energy and release it in a burst to knock Pride back, but the high demon casually twisted her blade that was still embedded in his chest and swung it upward, slicing through his neck and dividing his skull into two.
**BOOMM!!!
An explosion rang out in the air, causing the high demon to sigh as she looked up at the scene of Evan launching double energy blasts towards Methik and sighed again.
"Can't he do things silently?
And he's the one with the concealment skill."
Evan's high-profile actions attracted a lot of attention and within seconds, adventurers and knights were zooming into the area to find out what had happened.
Just before the first one to move in could get close enough to have a clear visual of Evan's face covered by the hood, the boy disappeared and reappeared behind Pride, grabbing the high demon's hand and pulling her down to the ground along with him.
His shadow expanded and the two of them melded into it, their sights darkening as they both sank into the ground and vanished.
When their visions brightened up once more, the duo were in front of the command centre tent, with Evan dragging along an unconscious half-dead Demonic Hand Senior Member.
"…you can use this level of advanced shadow magic?"
The Duke who sensed their presence came out of the tent and saw spoke after he noticed Evan's shadow returning to normal, however, the young hero only shook his head and replied.
"Don't forget I have a contract with a shadow spirit. Being able to temporarily borrow one of the spirit's skills is one of the contract's boons."
He walked into the tent and tossed Methik's wounded body on the floor, wrapping it up with shadows and continuing.
"I did not kill him.
The explosion that'd happen when I do is far too great for me to have done that in the camp."
Evan remembered the K.O. he got after he killed Methik in the game, and he definitely did not want to repeat that fatal mistake in reality.
It was then that he noticed that there was an unfamiliar face holding a recording stone, along with a magic projection device that was currently active on the table in the middle of the room.
"Who are you and why are you recording this?"
"He's from an intelligence unit under the Empress. He's recording the events here and relaying them in real-time to the Emperor and the rest of the Cabinet officials and nobles in the Capital."
Evan nodded before turning to the projected image of the Empress on the magic projector and offered a light greeting and then proceeded to walk towards the exit of the tent while dragging the unconscious Methik with him.
"I'm moving out again, are you coming, Pride?"
"Mhmm…"
The High demon nodded, throwing a glance at the intelligence officer with the recording stone and following behind Evan to leave the tent.
The hero-demon duo re-joined the battlefield once more, with Evan jumping right into a troop of undead knights and using wind magic to create a vacuum that pulled them together, before launching a singular elemental vortex that shredded them all to pieces of rotten flesh.
Pride, on the other hand, made her targets out to be the contracted demons of the Senior Demonic Hand members on the battlefield, seeking them out and taking them on one by one.
On a side note, Evan dealt with Methik by tossing his body into a troop of undead knights and mages that the Eighth Finger just summoned at a random point on the battlefield.
As soon as they came out of the large summoning circle, the man's body fell on the ground in front of them, leaving the undead momentarily confused, but the energy blast that shot right through Methik's heart in the next moment made sure those confused thoughts were their last.
In the skies above, Dominik and Czac were still on their aerial battle, with the occasional long raged holy magic coming from Sir Heinr who had dealt with the last of Vazgan's Elite Dullahans and was moving over to the Doom Lords the Eighth Finger was summoning.
The sheer number of undead creatures that Dominik had saved up over the past twenty-five years numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and despite the fact that the coalition force was killing thousands every minute, more just kept popping up to replace the defeated ones.
And the situation would have been a lot worse if it wasn't for the fact that Eliza's domain of life was there to push back Dominik's domain of death, along with the various debuffs that applied to anyone standing within it.
Her domain of life also served as a rest spot/home ground for the coalition force's combatants, passively enchanting the weapons of any living being within with the life attribute and making it so that any undead they killed could not be reanimated by Dominik.
This content is taken from (f)reewe(b)novel.𝗰𝗼𝐦