DEMON'S VIRTUE

A quick punch forward. Eiro's arm was grabbed. He felt strong force pull him forward. After jumping off the ground, he twisted his body around. Eiro twisted his legs around the puppet's arm, and let gravity do the rest.

Once the puppet started to lose balance, Eiro kicked against its thighs. After pushing its legs away with great strength, Eiro pulled his left leg over the puppet's neck. Meanwhile, he kicked his right knee into its face.

Eiro put his weight onto his left side and twisted around the staggered puppet's body. He was now sitting on its back, and was pullings its head up while restraining its arms. With a broad smile on his face, Eiro stood up again and looked at the puppet.

"Fifth win in a row. Guess I can finally start putting two tokens in at the same time, huh?" The Demon asked with a grin on his face. Meanwhile, there were a certain few people that were rather, well, surprised to see the Demon's performance against the puppet.

"For one... How and when did you get so strong? And two... I thought you can, like, predict stuff with that new card?" Jess asked as she looked at Eiro with a wry smile on her face, and the Demon turned around toward her with his brows raised, "Well, steady physical and mental improvement. I didn't even use any magic to improve my performance, since I luckily don't need that anymore when fighting against the puppet. That was my goal anyway." He explained as he looked at the wooden tokens in his hand, trying to figure out what he should try out next. These would all be rather new experiences, so he really wanted to test this out.

When it came to the combinations that he could make just with the hand-to-hand combat token, then that would be a combination of hand-to-hand combat and dagger-mastery. Eiro was quite curious how these techniques could be combined properly, honestly.

Then, there would be the combination of hand-to-hand combat and freerunning, which also seemed quite interesting in itself. Most of the time, Eiro was fighting in an environment where he could make proper use of his combat techniques while stationary, so that he could then move on to the next target. But with this combination, he should be able to figure out how to take on a lot of opponents far more quickly.

And then, there was the last token, which was the only one that Eiro would take on without truly mastering this yet.

After all, he didn't even manage to properly fuse his body into the environment yet while stationary for a long time, although he did get a lot better at it, at the very least, he was able to sense the puppet every time for now after a few moments of concentration. It still seemed pretty hard while it was moving though, so it would take him some time to figure that out in itself.

To an extent, Eiro wanted to wait adding that last token into the mix until he managed to hide himself properly so that he could follow along with the copying, but that would still take him a while to fully do. He could fuse himself with the physical materials around him through magic so that he seemed to basically disappear, but it worked in a completely different way than hiding yourself through the stealth skill.

Either way, that wasn't important for now. He should concentrate on improving all his abilities and use all the chances that he could get for that.

Well, that was part one of the question that Jess asked him to answer. Now, on to part two.

"And as for me being able to 'predict' things... Yes, and no. It's not like I get some sort of definite path that a person is going to take, but all the possibilities pop into my head. From then, I still have to figure out the most probably possibility, and go from there." The Demon pointed out, "It doesn't change much about my fighting itself, even if it does make counters a lot easier."

"Right... It feels like you're leaving us in the dust here, honestly..." Jess sighed deeply, and Eiro looked back at her and shrugged, "I'm a lot stronger than you, but that doesn't mean in any way that you guys are weak. If you continue the training that I told you to, then your guys' ability should steadily increase over time." Eiro explained, and the young mage slowly nodded her head.

"Mhm..." She replied passively. Eiro turned away, looking toward Gobo and the two Will-O'-Wisps currently getting acquainted with each other. After a bit of convincing, those two chose to give Gobo a chance, but that they wouldn't cooperate if he did anything that they didn't like or want.

Eiro was fine with that, as he expected that from the start. The Demon stretched out a little and then looked up at the sky to quickly figure out the time, "Alright, I should be able to get a bit more practice in before the kids get home." The Demon muttered quietly to himself. And then, he immediately proceeded to push the Dagger Mastery token into the Puppet's chest together with the Hand-to-Hand Combat token.

Eiro stepped over and then grabbed the two wooden daggers that he had made for the puppet a while ago, and gave them to his training partner real quick. It grabbed the two daggers and took up its stance.

From what Eiro could tell, this was already a smooth mixture of the two combat styles that the Demon was used to. He was a bit surprised that it was actually fighting with two daggers, though. For some reason, he expected the puppet to use one free hand and one dagger.

Well, he should probably take a look first. And so, he took his own stance as he held two wooden training daggers. And immediately, the puppet pushed forward.

Slash! Stab! Hack! The puppet swung the daggers at the Demon. Eiro defended these somewhat easily, as he was already used to the puppet's combat. It seemed a lot more agile and dexterous than before, though, so Eiro was wondering if it was hiding something from him. Just as he thought that, the puppet stabbed forward again, right at Eiro's face.

He moved backward out of habit, but before he knew it, he had the puppet's hand pressed against his chest and its leg right behind his own. After that quick push, the puppet caught the dagger that it just let go. It twisted the wooden dagger around in its hands, and then kept pushing forward.

Eiro caught himself rather easily and twisted his body back around to stand up, but when he did, he saw a palm moving toward him at high speed. He twisted around and dropped backward, ready to kick the puppet's own legs out of the way. But just then, the puppet's dagger revealed itself.

It had been spun around so that it basically rolled around the puppet's hand along one of the edges. The unexpected dagger just barely missed Eiro's face. And then, the puppet caught the dagger and wrapped its fingers around the handle. The tip was still pointing at Eiro's face though, so the puppet could immediately stab down.

Eiro let numerous thoughts flow through his mind, trying to figure out how to counter this attack. However, at the same time, he noticed something else. While Eiro was focused on the puppet's left hand, the dagger in its right hand had also disappeared. It had thrown it toward its foot so that it could push the tip against Eiro's head from underneath as well. Now, he would only be able to move to the left or right. But there was another issue with that.

The puppet's stance. To an extent, it was extremely unstable. He should be able to push it over into any direction with ease. But at the same time, that's what made this stance versatile, giving it the ability to move into any direction in any manner however it wished.

The puppet had its weight focused on its left leg and put all its force into its left arm and right leg so that it could push them together as if it was a jaw snapping down on something.

But at the same time, it was still able to move all its limbs, beside its left leg, into any direction that it wanted to. Especially with its right arm, it was able to correct its own movement in any way necessary according to Eiro's own movement.

So, there was only one thing that the Demon could do. He didn't move at all. Instead, he pulled his arms up to his head as quickly as possible, placing one of his own wooden daggers right onto his face, and the other one right underneath his head. This way, he could block the incoming attack.

In response, the puppet slightly twisted its own to daggers out of the way to simply avoid Eiro's daggers. But that gave the Demon the chance to slice to the side with his own daggers to completely put the puppet's daggers off course, while also disrupting its stance at the same time.

And then, to get out of this situation quickly, Eiro kicked off the ground and used this split-second where the puppet's stance was unstable to reset himself as well, just as the puppet had to do the same. Numerous thoughts rushed through Eiro's mind, and he was trying to think of a good way to beat the puppet with this style. It seemed to rely on the blade moving around freely within the range of one's body, while allowing you to free up certain parts of your own body for offensive, or sometimes even defensive purposes.

It seemed like an interesting style that fit Eiro pretty well, so he was interested in learning this combined variation of his two main physical-combat styles. But for now... he really just had to force a lot of different moves out of the puppet, so that he could go through them in his mind over and over again to learn them properly. That was the basis of how Eiro studied physical things. He looked at them a couple times, used his <Memory of a Scholar> to go through it and copy everything, and then applied it in real life numerous times until it started turning into muscle-memory.

Luckily, as the style was based off of ones that Eiro already knew, his body's muscles were already close to perfect for this style. He just had to open up a few more variations for himself.

And just like that, training continued.