GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

He would have gotten away too if Viron hadn't started that last spell. He didn't know what the spell could do but he knew it was bad. Nothing that accumulates so much mana and creates such a commotion in the fluctuations of ambient sin energy can be good. It meant that whatever Viron was doing, he had to get a lot of external help to achieve it. It couldn't be good.

So he returned to disrupt the casting. It was then that he noticed that Viron's mana was low and his status was mentally drained. It was an opportunity he couldn't miss. He even used the knowledge of the weakness of the spell that he had been hiding.

He had been pretending to be unable to deal with the fireball spell because he couldn't take advantage of it earlier. Viron might be able to cast spells, but it is only barely. There are some vulnerabilities in the spell structure that he can take advantage of by using Chaos energy to destabilize them.

He began searching through the corpse for any loot before he burned it. He found some scribblings on a paper written in the demon tongue. They were notes about Viron's spells. Demon spellcraft is different from other races because of the addition of sin energy. Sin energy makes it difficult to cast spells. But the major reason why demons have undeveloped spellcraft is because of the lack of sharing.

Demons aren't social beings. They try to kill each other right from the day they were born. No matter how intelligent and civilized they become as they grow stronger, they will still compete with one another. The demon society is all about competition and survival of the fittest. They might be civil for one moment, but if one of them happens to be weakened, then they will let go of their mask of civility and feast on the weakened one.

Demons don't have any responsibility towards each other or bonds that hold society together. Some demons are watching him right now. They were probably drawn here because of the sounds of their fight. They are watching him for any sign of weakness. If they find that their chances of victory are suitable, then they will come forward to do battle.

But they won't come forward for any revenge. Just like no one came forward for the demons he had killed in the past. Instead, the watching demons had fought over the ownerless territory after he was gone and divided it amongst themselves.

Demons are selfish. They would never share the secret of their strength with one another. They would rather die than share knowledge because knowledge is power. It is this competition that makes them grow but it also made them stagnate. He killed Viron and got his spell notes. That's the only way information is shared in the demon society, over their dead bodies.

Even worse is that most knowledge isn't written down. There is no organization that brings demons of like minds together for learning. Eternal bloodlines don't exist to establish familial bonds and bloodline families. Ordinary families don't exist in the demon realm either. Most demons are given birth to by demon sirers so there is no opportunity for bonding through that.

The minimum requirement for reproduction is reaching the high-rank stage, but the demon society doesn't allow for normal families. It is a demon-eat-demon world. There won't be a father that will feed his kids and pay for their education. There won't be a loving sibling that will share things with you, things like weapons and spells. Most often, your demon siblings are planning how to kill you before going on to kill their parents so that they can inherit everything.

Aeternus continued his journey forward, fighting and killing. He didn't have the concept of stamina due to the nature of his body and his energy was infinite. His access to infinite chaos energy is different from his access to origin energy from the Virut plane. So he had two avenues of infinite energy, he had no reason to stop, rest or sleep.

His feats began to spread. Demons started talking about him. They don't have much to do apart from killing each other and guarding their territories, so sometimes they meet up and talk to their neighbors. He had been walking and fighting for more than 3 months now so more and more demons became aware of the low-rank demon killing mid-rank demons.

Some came to see him and see for themselves. While others chose to band together to ambush him. Something had to be special about Aeternus for him to be that powerful. They suspect it is the weapon he is using. It is a good-looking sword if anything else. They don't know what is special about him for him to be so strong but they intend to find out after his death.

This led to a lot of fighting for Aeternus which he welcomed with glee. He is currently in a free for all. About 20 mid-rank demons are fighting each other and he is one of them. The height difference made him seem like a dwarf amongst normal people.

He shifted his weight and the position of his claymore, it made his posture tilt to the left. He went along with the flow and moved left, just by a fraction. The sword of his giant opponent missed him, just by a fraction, and buried itself into the ground. His opponent had wanted to cleave him in two but he missed.

The sword kicked up a lot of dirt but it did nothing to obscure Aeternus's vision or to stop his movement. He twisted his wrist again and shifted the claymore, he pressed one foot forward and placed the claymore between the legs of his giant opponent. Then he raised the claymore with all his strength with its sharp edge facing upwards. The two-handed blade tore through his opponent's guts and couldn't go any further because of the height difference.