Demon's Virtue

648 First Artificing Lesson

The room was silent, with a dense air of confusion filling it thoroughly. The first to speak up again was Partax, “You want me to waste my time with a place like that? Why would I do anything of the sort?” he asked, clearly thinking that a task like this was below him. Far, far below him. But Eiro didn’t care; he had wanted to upgrade the security of the Academy for a while now, but he didn’t know where to start exactly. Something at that scale was still beyond his capabilities as an artificer. But for Partax, it should be the easiest thing in the world.

“To make up for your mistake, as well as simply because I’m asking you to,” Eiro explained simply, but Partax wasn’t convinced, “What, so just because you have some information I want, I have to do whatever you want me to?”

“I never said that I wouldn’t tell you if you refuse to do this. I just think you should; it’s the right thing to do. In the first place, you’re here to teach me, so let’s just work on this together, and you can teach me in the process. Rather than us making some random knickknack that will simply be thrown into a corner never to be seen again, let’s try and work on something that has an actual use,” the Demon suggested. He wanted to use his time as efficiently as he could, that’s what he’s always done since leaving his home in the forest; since leaving behind that small house that had been burnt to the ground by now.

Partax seemed to consider the idea for a moment, “Hm... you make a convincing point. There are a few principles I could very well teach you that way,” the halfling muttered, before looking at a stunned Solomon, “Consider yourself lucky, for I will make that academy a safer place!”

The King grabbed the armrests of his chair, about to push himself up in a bout of anger at how preposterous Partax was being, after all that he had done at the academy. He was even growing angry at Eiro. Not annoyed, or merely upset, but truly angry. An emotion of this kind was something he very rarely felt toward Eiro, and he wanted to keep it that way. Solomon took a deep breath and was overcome with a rush of thoughts. Sure, Partax did something horrible at the academy, but Eiro had already promised that the halfling would never get close to there again, so the process of creating that system would be done here, at a safe distance from the students, and Eiro himself would be the one installing it at the academy’s grounds. While Eiro would probably sneak in a few things here and there that weren’t particularly necessary, Solomon trusted that the Demon would do anything he could to make the academy a safer place. His own children attended it, after all.

Solomon glanced at the machine that Partax had mounted. The spider-like, brass legs protruding from it that were shining like gold and gave off just a hint of the scent of oil. He had never seen anything like this before. And Solomon had seen the creations of Armodeus a handful of times before now as well, and he knew of Koperia’s mere power. Not to mention Shimour, who had managed to one-sidedly beat Eiro in an all-out fight. And certainly, none of what Solomon had seen thus far was close to the limits that those people could achieve, he was convinced of that already. Having someone like that make sure that the academy would be a safe place... and with such sincerity in his voice as well. If Solomon turned that down, that would be close to treason to his people he had sworn to protect.

“...I will allow it... But again, he may not step foot near the Academy, so you will have to create this ‘system’ here, and then bring it to the Academy separately. And you will give me a detailed report of every single, tiny feature that will be part of this system. If at any point we find something that you didn’t tell me about, the whole thing goes,” Solomon said strictly, setting a clear boundary. Even if he were fully against it, Eiro would probably find a way to convince him anyway, so this way he could at least retain a slight bit of control over the situation. The Demon quickly nodded, “Of course. I’ll make sure of all of that.”

Partax raised a brow, looking at Solomon with a curious expression, “Who’re you anyway, one of Eiro’s colleagues?”

.....

—

“No, no! Not that way! You have to twist it another way!”

“Then show me what way instead of just saying that.”

“I am showing you!”

“Trust me, you’re not, if any part of you show the slightest hint of how I’m supposed to twist it, then I’d be able to tell,” Eiro retorted annoyed, and Partax groaned loudly, “You buffoon! Fine, give it to me, I’ll show you!”

Partax pulled the small glass marble out of one of Eiro’s hands, and quickly seemed to try and pinch part of it. Of course, you couldn’t pinch something like this, but Partax simply tried to grab part of the mana that was flowing through this object. Previously, Eiro had already created an equator within this marble and made the mana twist through it at a high speed along that equator. Now, he was supposed to skew the second layer of rotation slightly, but Partax didn’t seem to understand that this was Eiro’s first time encountering this process. Hence, he couldn’t simply ‘figure it out’. It was as if Partax was expecting Eiro to be capable of reading his mind. Rather, this happened so often already that Eiro was considering finding out how to read minds to make this process more bearable.

After Partax took hold of the mana inside of the marble, he simply pulled on it and ever so slightly gave the twist an angle. By a fraction of a percent. A few seconds, when seen on the circumference of a clock.

“See? That’s all you had to do!” Partax groaned, “Now you do it! But add the same interval onto it again, and then again! And then repeat, until you’ve gone around once!”

Eiro sighed slightly, “Do you even know how many of these marbles that’s going to take?”

“Eight-thousand-six-hundred-thirty-eight, not including the one I did for you, or the one that can stay as it is. Now get to it, it’s going to take a while!” the halfling grunted, and Eiro rolled his eyes as Partax placed a crate filled with glass marbles directly in front of him. The Demon waved his hand and created a duplicate of himself, partially fused with Gondos to increase its mana sensitivity. Instead of just four arms, it had eight, and Eiro had limited its thoughts to the process of this creation. He still learned everything that the duplicate learned of course. Through Eiro’s ‘Physical Absorption’ ability, he could even gain the muscle-memory of the duplicate as it went through this process. And most importantly, it just sped up the process incredibly.

The duplicate quickly got to work, and the Demon turned to Partax, “What else?”

Clicking his tongue annoyed, the halfling turned around, “Kids these days, too lazy to do it themselves... I thought you wanted to learn! If that’s the case, do it yourself, dammit!”

“I am doing it myself. Just consider it multitasking. It makes the process of learning from you much faster; after all, I doubt you want to spend months here to teach me everything I need to know,” the Demon pointed out, and after that argument, Partax couldn’t even complain anymore, “Pah! Fine!”

The master artificer grabbed a box filled with metal sheets and threw it over to the Demon, who quickly caught it, “Then let’s get started making some traps. Basically, imbuing a spell either permanently or temporarily onto a surface with certain activation conditions. I’d guess that in particular is going to help your war against the Devil as well, rather than the engineering side of things.”

Eiro smirked. That was exactly what he was hoping for. He had numerous spells in his arsenal, but most of them were simply impractical to use in an actual fight. But if he were to turn them into traps, then he could at least make more of a broader range of his prowess.

“Right, so what is it that I need to do?” Eiro asked. He did know some of the ideas behind it, but he figured that Partax would have a slightly different method. At least that’s what he judged from seeing him work a little until now. The halfling quickly pointed at the board, “Simple. You take the magic circle, and then deconstruct it into its basic components. Then, you convert those into an array of artificing sigils, branching off to add the different conditions onto each aspect of it.”

The Demon listened intensely and curiously. The way that it was explained in the books he had access to so far was similar, but far more simple. There, they often suggested just engraving a regular magic circle instead of converting it. According to those ‘researchers’, there was little apparent benefit, and many more detriments to this process. So, learning how that was nonsense was more than interesting to Eiro, especially since those ‘artificing sigils’ were something that Eiro hadn’t heard of before, nor this particular method of conversion.

The only problem was that Partax stopped talking.

He stared at Eiro, as if waiting for something to happen, “So? Get to it.”