DEMON'S VIRTUE

Both Sammy and Rudy stared at Eiro in confusion as the Demon finished speaking. Felix himself was just speechless, he really didn't know how to react to that third option.

"You're considering helping him?" Rudy asked, before Eiro just slowly nodded his head, "I do. He acted out of line because of fear of his father. And while in my eyes that isn't a viable enough excuse to avoid punishment completely, he's not fully at fault either." The Demon explained, slowly placing his mask back onto his face as he released Felix's neck.

"So, what will it be? One, two, or three?" Eiro asked once more, and with a nervous expression, she just said what she was thinking, "...Th-Three, of course..." Sammy muttered as she looked at Felix, who was still sobbing on the ground. He was pretty pathetic at the moment, but that was just because he thought he was about to die. She understood how he felt, really. Sammy still didn't forget what had happened to her in the first nine years of her life, after all.

"Alright then. Felix, go on and take this bed. I'll be staying up tonight just in case, but I doubt anyone should be able to get in here with all those scouts anyway" He pointed out as Eiro just made his way to the door to the other room and opened it up to call Clementine and Arc over as well.

"Oh, you're back!" Arc exclaimed, "Can we, like, take some time to hunt a bit tomorrow? Please?" The boy asked excitedly, still holding his new weapons in his hands with a broad grin.

"Sure, but that's not what I want to talk about right now. And be quiet, Leon and Avalin are sleeping, aren't they?" Eiro pointed out as he pulled Arc into the other room and Clementine quickly followed behind, "Oops, sorry. I'm just really excited, hehe." He muttered quietly, and Eiro just sighed as he pointed at Felix, who was currently being helped to stand up by Rudy.

"From tomorrow on, he's going to be with us for a little while. I'm going to be keeping a close eye on him, so don't worry about his skill." The Demon explained to them, and Arc just looked at Felix with a smile.

"Coolio. Finally some other guy to hang out with!" He exclaimed, although Rudy stared at him confusedly in response, "Hey, what's that supposed to mean?!"

With a light chuckle, Arc just walked up to him and swung his arm around Rudy's shoulder, "You're my bro, but I know you don't always want to hang out with me either." Arc laughed loudly, and soon the whole conversation between those two descended into continuous banter.

With a slight sigh, Eiro just looked out the window and tried to spot one of the scouts that seemed to belong to Solomon, and then opened the window up for a moment. "I'll be right back. One of you please stay with Leon and Avalin." The Demon said, and then quickly pushed a lot of his Life Force into his legs and cloaked his body in air magic, swiftly pushing himself off the edge of the window to jump as far along the street he could.

Of course he couldn't traverse the whole street with a single jump, instead landing on the roof of a carriage for a moment and then jumping along to the side of the building on the other side to climb up there. And then on the roof, he stepped up to the chimney to approach the scout that was hiding there.

He seemed to be rather surprised that Eiro was able to find him so easily, but since the scout was aware that he was amongst those they were supposed to be guarding, he didn't try to keep hiding from Eiro.

"How can I help you, Master Eiro?" The scout asked as he kneeled on the ground in front of the Demon, and Eiro just slightly scratched the back of his neck, actually feeling quite uncomfortable through the word 'Master'. But he didn't want to bother with correcting him either, so he just let it be. They wouldn't be speaking to each other much more than this, after all.

"I was told that your King was going to prepare something for us. Do you know when it will arrive here? We want to leave as early in the morning as we can."

"Yes, Master Eiro. It should be here before dawn so that you can get ready for departure." The scout explained, so Eiro just nodded his head in satisfaction. "I see, good to know. Thanks." The Demon replied. He was actually pretty curious what kind of gift a King would be giving them. With a satisfied smile, he turned back around.

"Tell Solomon that I appreciate it. And thanks for looking out for us tonight." Eiro said and then quickly jumped off of the roof to make his way back into the Inn through the window he jumped out of before.

"All of you, try to get to sleep. We're waking up before sunrise." The Demon told them as he closed the window again, and the others looked at him confusedly.

"What do you mean? Why are we going that early?" Arc asked, about to heavily protest, and Eiro quickly explained it as he started lightly knocking on the walls with his knuckles in different positions.

"Oh, Enka's definitely trying something. I want to leave as soon as we can, and the gift from Solomon will be ready just before dawn, so that's when we're leaving. Apparently it's going to help us on our trip, so we should really wait for it." Eiro explained, before he found the entrance into the hollow space right behind the wall and started pushing one of his chisels into the place where the 'lock' seemed to be to crack it open from this side by pushing the chisel inbetween the wooden boards.

It seemed like everyone was rather surprised at what Eiro was currently doing, although Felix for a different reason from the others. Either way, Eiro soon managed to force the hidden door open and was then looking into the hidden corridor behind the wall.

"How did you-"

"How did I know that there's numerous hidden passages inside of this building? It wasn't that hard to figure it out." Eiro interrupted Felix, who had managed to calm down a little bit again, but was still just baffled at how Eiro was able to find it this easily.

Either way, the Demon then turned around and looked at the others again, "Go on, sleep. All of you. I'm going to stay right here, so don't worry." Eiro said, and then sat down cross-legged inside of the hidden hallway, and as if this was rather natural, Sammy made her way into the other room, where Clementine was already preparing for bed, and Arc and Rudy got ready for bed as well while Felix was still just nervously sitting on the free bed.

Meanwhile, Eiro was trying to concentrate on the way these hidden corridors were built. Sure, he was able to figure out that there were hidden passages even from outside, but he wasn't able to figure out how intricately they were constructed.

He wanted to see where they connected to, but he didn't want to leave the kids alone, so he went for it like this. "Nelli, make sure that Felix doesn't try to look in here." Eiro told the Naiad. Since the bed that Felix was going to sleep in was on the same side of the room as the hidden passage, he couldn't look inside that easily, so Eiro figured he could freely take his mask off.

As Nelli floated there in front of Eiro like that, continuosly watching Felix, she spoke to Eiro after slipping into the halfway-space where only Eiro could see and hear her.

"Why do you want to take him with us?" Nelli asked, and the Demon sighed deeply in response before whispering out, "I'm not a big fan of the idea either, but that's how it is. Just think of it this way. Our little Gnome here wasn't sold piece by piece, but instead forced to attack and kill people despite not wanting to. Would that be much different from the situation Felix is in?" Eiro asked Nelli, and the Spirit slowly turned her eyes toward the Demon.

"That's an unfair comparison. The Gnome is literally just a kid... Felix is... what, eighteen, nineteen?" Nelli pointed out, and Eiro nodded his head, "As such he was groomed into this position for the past eighteen years. As I said before, he can't push all the responsibility off onto Enka, but seriously, you saw him out there. He was genuinely terrified when I mentioned the first and second, and genuinely relieved when I mentioned the third option. He was actually most scared with the second one, since that would probably mean he would have to face his father tomorrow."

Nelli quietly looked at Felix and then at Arc as he was laying in his bed, instantly having fallen asleep, "I see... If you hadn't saved... or rather, kidnapped them back then, they would also be quite different people now, huh?" The Naiad muttered. With an immediate reaction, Eiro replied, "Exactly. They would have been raised into tools of war instead. I don't think Felix is an inherently bad kid. It's not like he was lying when he called Sammy beautiful either, or when he was saying that he wanted to spend as much time with her as possible."

"Eh..?" Nelli asked all of a sudden, "How do you know?"

With a slight frown, Eiro looked at the Spirit and slighty chuckled, "After all the practice with Sammy to help her prepare for her unsealed skill, I understood how lies work at least a little bit. I can't always say for sure, but I can at least tell when someone is serious about something or not. That's how I knew that I could trust Solomon for caring for his son that much, and I also could tell that Felix was telling the truth when he spoke to Sammy." The Demon explained, although Nelli looked at him with even more confusion than before.

"Then why were you getting so upset? I thought you were angry because he was playing with Sammy?" She asked him, and Eiro looked at her with a sigh as if the answer should be rather obvious.

"He was still using a skill to get his words through to Sammy more intensely, and most of all..." Eiro explained, hitting the ground he was sitting on just so slightly, "He was flirting with my daughter. That really pissed me off."

With a wry smile, Nelli just kept looking at Eiro as if she honestly hadn't expected that sort of answer, although she then just laughed lightly, "Well, I guess that's something scary that parents have to go through, eh?" Nelli laughed, and Eiro stared at her with a light frown.

"Scary? No, no, more like disgusting. I'm not letting anyone with bad intentions ever get close to any of those children."

"And how're you going to judge which are bad, and which are good intentions?" Nelli asked with a quiet chuckle, and Eiro just closed his eyes in preparation for trying to sense the inside of the hidden passages in this Inn.

"I'll make those choices case-by-case, obviously." The Demon pointed out, although Nelli was pretty sure she already knew which result those 'Case-by-case' choices would mostly end up having anyway.

Either way, while this was definitely something important that Eiro had to keep in mind, for now he had to properly figure this place out already.. Letting his mana flow through his body in circular streams, Eiro tried to accelerate his mana-regeneration as much as he could, and then kept pushing air-magic infused breaths out of his body to try and figure this place out as much as he could.