DEMON'S VIRTUE

Eiro slowly opened his eyes and let out a deep breath as he looked in front of himself at the Gnome that was just floating there. Over the past week, he had progressed a fair amount. It seemed like Nelli agreed that he was sure to find his name soon. And Eiro was actually rather hopeful for it to happen within the next day or two, since they had to pass through a mountain-range soon.

That meant that they would really be entering the natural habitat of this guy. Most Earth Spirits lived in this kind of place, after all. Hopefully they would be able to find a place where other spirits live, or a place where natural mana was especially dense at the very least. Either of that would be incredibly helpful.

Eiro pushe himself off the ground and stretched a bit. It was morning soon, so the others should wake up just about now. In the meantime, Eiro figured he should take another closer look at his wounds from a week ago.

He walked up to the carriage and placed his satchel down on top of the bench at the front of the carriage, before quickly taking off his mask and cloak, placing both of them into his treasury. The first things that he did was to simply get started with cleaning the general cuts on his body a little after taking the bandages off. He tried his best to make sure that there was no dirt in them or anything.

For the most part, his wounds were healing pretty well, especially considering that he had Nelli heal him a little bit every day. Once his wounds were cleaned, the Demon took out a small leather-flask out of his bag and opened it up. Using water magic, he just pulled the liquid out of the bottle.

This liquid was highly refined water made by Nelli that Eiro then placed a few different herbs into that were supposed to help with natural healing of your body. The highly refined water absorbed these qualities pretty quickly, and as such turned into a liquid that could easily be used to enhance the basic healing capabilities of healing magic.

Eiro spread a little bit of this onto each of his most serious wounds and then looked over at Nelli, who quickly started to use it as a conductor for healing magic. And while Nelli was helping him out like this, Eiro poured the rest of the liquid that he didn't use with this just now back into the flask and placed it back into his satchel. The parts that Nelli was using to heal him couldn't, or rather shouldn't, be reused after all. They would just spread it around the side of the path later, and then it would be fine.

The Naiad finished what she was doing just a couple minutes later, so Eiro picked the water up using magic and threw it behind the carriage that was placed down at the side of the road at the moment.

Then, he simply dried himself off and put new bandages onto his wounds before putting his cloak and mask back on. Around then, the others seemed to have woken up and gathered together to eat. Eiro said good morning to everyone and then looked over toward Felix.

The Demon held his hand flat and stretched out, with his fingers pressed against each other, and then placed the fingertips of his three middle fingers onto the right side of his chin, before pulling his hand away again, directly away from his face. And when Felix repeated the same gesture, Eiro just lightly nodded his head.

He was glad that this sign-language thing was kind of working out. Just now, both of them were doing the sign for 'good morning', but other than that, Felix seemed to know the basics of how a couple more of them worked.

After all, both Felix's and Eiro's learning-speed was slightly increased by the Sign-Language Comprehension skill that they both got. Well, Eiro's more so because of his 'Speedier Learning' ability he got from increasing his Wisdom stat to 200. Felix's because he was doing nothing but study sign-language using the notes that Eiro took for him to help him learn it. Beginner-Grade skills didn't really do all that much for you, after all.

Either way, for now, Felix was able to at least somehow 'speak' with someone else at least in a simple manner. It seemed to help him calm down a bit, as far as Eiro noticed.

After they all had breakfast, the two Aria were connected to the carriage again and Arc sat down at the front of the carriage to start driving. Pretty soon afterward, they entered the mountain-range and things became pretty steep. This slowed them down a bit, but less than Eiro had honestly been expecting.

The carriage was able to turn pretty quickly, and the Aria had a good grip on the ground, so they were able to proceed pretty quickly anyway. However, since the Aria had to pull the heavy carriage up a slope, they had to take a break a bit sooner than normal, albeit still later than if they had travelled with horses, and stopped by a spot that was relatively flat.

There were some remnants of a couple of fireplaces around here that Eiro noticed, so this was probably a pretty popular resting-spot for people that travelled through these parts.

That actually came to a surprise to Eiro, since he noticed a couple of Monsters around here. To be fair, they didn't necessarily seem all that strong, but they should still be pretty bothersome to the average person, as far as Eiro could tell.

Although, then again, Eiro was pretty curious about this. It seemed like there was a village of goblins around here. You couldn't access it through the regular paths, and it was built inbetween two cliff-walls that you had to specifically climb toward to see. There was only one specific path that led out of it, and that seemed to go through a small cave system.

The goblins would surely be able to let him level up a bit if he went there and killed them all, but he didn't really feel like it because of the disgusting stench that goblin-blood had. Although just when he was thinking that, he noticed that the Gnome was interested in what laid in that direction as well.

"Nelli, do you see anything over there?" Eiro asked and pointed into the direction where the Gnome was looking, and Nelli slowly turned her head and squinted her eyes.

"Hm... There seems to be a lot of natural mana there, yeah. But I don't think it's anything special. Why?" Nelli replied, so Eiro just crossed his arms in thought, "There's a Goblin Village over there. And I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that there's a lot of mana there. Maybe there's something interesting that made them gather? The Goblins do seem to be a variant of regular goblins as well." Eiro explained, at least that's what he thought from their behaviour and the faint smell that actually reached him here, and Nelli thought about it some more and kept looking over there.

"Then maybe, yeah. It could be worth checking out if the Gnome is interested." The Naiad pointed out, and Eiro immediately nodded his head.

"Just my thought." He said, and then looked over toward the children, "You guys, stay here. We'll be gone for a little while, maybe an hour or two at most, so just relax a bit for now. But make sure that if you notice anyone approaching, you help Avalin put her contact lenses in, or have her hide in the carriage." Eiro told them with a smile.

He didn't have any issues with leaving them alone for a bit anymore, since they weren't actually being pursued anymore! Maybe a day after Eiro woke up after killing Enka, he had received a letter from Armodeus that he sent through some kind of mechanical bird. It didn't smell like something that Armodeus made, though. Either way, that letter told them that Solomon and Armodeus could convince the guards that Eiro definitely didn't kill Irensen, no matter what his employee told the guards.

Since the literal king of a country and the best craftsman in town were a bit more influential than the top employee of the second-best craftsman in town, the matter was quickly settled. Eiro was pretty glad about that, because that meant he could actually go ahead with things like these and leave the kids be for a while, instead of having to be around them 24/7.

Eiro climbed up the rock-wall behind the carriage, quickly followed by the Gnome and Nelli, and then proceeded to make his way over toward the top of one of the cliff-walls that the village was built in between of, so that he could scout it out properly first.

It took him a while, maybe fifteen minutes, to find a good path and spot to watch the whole village from. But once he found that spot, Eiro stared down onto the ground and immediately noticed a few peculiarities.

For one, the Goblins really were pretty obviously a variant. Instead of dark green skin, these goblins had more like green-brown skin, although it was more like it was different from each individual to another. One could have skin in a shade that was a bit lighter than the regular goblin-green, and another one could have skin that was so dark brown that it was nearly black. They all smelled the same though, so the color of their skin seemed to be an unimportant difference between them. In general, all of these goblins seemed to be a bit stronger and more well-fed than regular goblins that Eiro had met in some forests before.

The houses they lived in didn't seem to be that badly constructed either, even if most of them were just holes in the wall. But inbetween those hols in the wall, there were some properly constructed bridges that seemed stable enough for a dozen or two of them to walk on at once.

Then, amongst these one or two hundred goblins that seemed to be gathered here, Eiro noticed that there were nine of them that were a bit stronger, taller, and less disproportioned than the other goblins, making their figure look more like that of a human or elf.

Eiro figured that those nine specimens were Hobgoblins, a higher evolution of regular goblins. These guys seemed to be in power here, and were directly feared by the lower goblins.

But one of these Hobgoblins seemed even stronger than the others. Eiro wasn't exactly sure what it was about him that was so different, since he didn't smell all too different from the others at least, but he was taller, bulkier, and seemed to be feared by the hobgoblins.

Really, he didn't seem all that strong to Eiro. But maybe after facing and killing Enka, his standards had risen a little bit.

Either way, there was one thing in this town that Eiro was paying special attention to. And that was whatever the leader of all these goblins, the strongest Hobgoblin, was sitting on. It was something like a decorated, carved slab of rock that the Gnome seemed to be staring at intensely.

"Nelli." Eiro said, and the spirit quickly nodded her head, "Yeah, that slab is the place where most of the mana I noticed before is focused. It might help the Gnome out a bit." She suggested, so Eiro slowly nodded his head.

"Sounds good." The Demon said and looked around these cliff-walls for a bit to find a good route, and Nelli looked at him curiously.

"So? What are you planning on doing?" She asked, so Eiro just smirked at her, "Oh, I'm simply going to completely eradicate the hierarchy of this goblin village."