Table of Contents
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 1
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 2
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 3
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 4
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 5
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 6
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 7
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 8
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 9
Demon Core - #6 - Chapter 10
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 1
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 2
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 3
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 4
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 5
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 6
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 7
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 8
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 9
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 10
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 11
Knight's Code #7 - Chapter 12
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 1
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 2
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 3
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 4
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 5
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 6
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 7
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 8
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 9
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 10
Demon's Heritage #8 - Chapter 11
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 1
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 2
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 3
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 4
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 5
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 6
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 7
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 8
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 9
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 10
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 11
Demon's Legacy #9 - Chapter 12
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 1
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 2
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 3
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 4
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 5
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 6
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 7
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 8
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 9
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 10
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 11
Demonic Valor #10 - Chapter 12
Demon Core - #6-1
With the time winding down before the arrival of his opponents from the seven swords guild, Ash spent more time fighting. Emelia didn’t complain as long as Ash spent three nights with her out of the week.
Ash was a little surprised that Emelia was so strong headed about their night time, but she was more than vigorous. Ash had been slightly worried about any child that he might have since it would carry what the rest of the world considered tainted blood, but Emelia calmed his fears. It seemed that one could have a baby blessed before its birth to ensure that it would be born a full human. This was most often done to women who had been attacked by a member of another race, but it was an expensive spell. Not because it was hard or needed an advance level priest, but because it required the person doing it to be discrete.
Having never had a relationship before, Ash felt a little lost when dealing with Emelia. Before when they were together she would only kiss him or even touch him when they were completely alone, but now whenever she saw him, she would give him a light kiss. Ash had thought that little would change once they were wed, but he had been sorely mistaken.
Other than Emelia and the upcoming battle with the Seven Swords Guild Ash also had to deal with Yuki and Allice. The two had become friends and often even Tina came over to talk with them. While they were friendly whenever Ash was around, they wouldn’t leave him alone. He was starting to feel like a worn out toy.
Thankfully Ash had his time in the labyrinth each day to relax. He found it slightly odd that the only time he had to relax was while fighting for his life but he tried not to think too deeply about it.
During the past weeks, Ash’s demon absorption had reached level 3, allowing him now to receive an ability after only absorbing thirty monsters. Not only that, he was now able to absorb all of the boss monsters that he fought. Due to this, each day Ash would warp to each boss room to fight, but he had yet to gain an ability from any of the bosses.
Though the bosses had yet to give him an ability, the light hounds on the twenty-second floor had given him the shimmer ability.
[Shimmer: cost 10SP- surrounds the body with light making it hard to discern movement.]
The ability was almost useless against most monsters, but Ash could see its appeal when he had to fighting against other humans.
Right now though they were fighting on the twenty-third floor against ogres. The inside of the labyrinth floor looked much like the side of a barren mountain. The ogres fought in groups of two or three most of the time, though it wasn’t that uncommon to find a lone one. They were eight to ten feet tall with dark green skin and large boar-like tusks and used crude clubs as weapons. After they were defeated, they dropped their tusks and Lillanis and the others were overjoyed by this. It seemed that ogre tusks were used in high quality strength potions and sold even better than many of the drops of higher level monsters, but that was only the case for the good quality ones. If they were average or below, the price dropped drastically.
“Another good quality tusk,” Halon said with a large smile. “I never heard of a dungeon that had ogres to fight before the thirtieth floor.”
“Yea, but even then, the drop rate for tusks is supposed to be really low compared to most the other monsters,” Jacob said shaking his head. “I think we should just call Ash the golden boy for now on. If we keep this up, we will be set for years.”
“I can finally get me a sword made out of Elemantis,” Halon said happily.
“You wish,” Jacob replied laughing. “Elemantis cost a platinum coin an ounce. It would cost at least forty platinum coins just to buy the metal and just as much to find a blacksmith that could forge it.”
“Don’t kill my dreams,” Halon said frowning.
Elemantis was the second hardest metal known and was sought after. The only thing harder was dragon steel, which was only given by the very rare steel dragons. A single sword of dragon steel would cost the same amount as a decent sized countries gross income for more than a few years.
“Stop playing around, I want to hunt a few more before we are forced to leave,” Lillanis said. Unlike the floors before when they had started fighting ogres, she had become rather ruthless.
“She always gets like this when we stumble on a good source of money,” Jacob whispered to Ash. “She keeps up with our money so honestly, neither I nor Halon know how much we have. We don’t even notice we are broken until Lillanis tells us we’re permanently camping.”
“Then I can understand,” Ash said with a half hidden smile. “With the way you two eat and drink, I am surprised she is able to keep any money put back.”
“That’s a little harsh…But you are probably right,” Jacob said with a chuckle.
“Let’s go,” Lillanis yelled and the two jumped and quickly moved to follow.
This time they found a group of three ogres, two of which were having a head butting contest. Sighing, Ash and Halon rushed forward. Even though he had a lower level, Ash took on two of the ogres alone while the other three worked to take down the one left.
The ogres were ridiculously strong, but also slow and incredibly stupid. Unlike the higher level monsters, the ogres didn’t fight Ash because they could sense his strength, but because they couldn’t tell
how strong any of them were. The ogres just fought whoever or whatever appeared in front of them.
Jumping to the side to dodge one of the ogres’ strikes, flecks of rocks bounced and hit Ash doing 2 damage to his HP. Each time he saw the strength of the creature’s attacks, Ash was amazed. Even with his strength and endurance, one strike head on would most likely kill him, or at least horribly wounded. Thankfully the attacks were slow, so even dealing with two ogres was not that much of a problem. The real challenge was doing any real damage to the ogres. Even with his high strength, Ash had trouble breaking through their skin, and unlike Halon and Jacob, he didn’t have any skills that could easily penetrate the ogre’s natural skin. He had tried his shadow ship, but even that only worked against armor and not the ogre’s skin.
Halon used sword bash, a warrior skill that allowed him to negate 40% of the opponent’s defense while Jacob used stealth strike which allowed him to ignore 100%. Ash was used to being the powerhouse of the group, but against the ogres it was Jacob who shined the brightest.
After the first ogre was taken down, Ash pulled back while Halon drew the attention of one of the ogres while he kept the last one busy. Even fighting one on one, Ash was not able to take the Ogre down before Jacob and Halon took down theirs, though he had done a lot of damage to the creature. Thanks to the damage Ash had done, it only took one strike from Jacob to bring the last ogre down for good.
None of Jacob’s stats were higher than Ash’s. The only thing that made him stand out was his skills. Seeing how effective the skills were, Ash started to understand why there were so many guilds. Ash had taken his reading time with Emelia to read up about skills and guilds.
There was not many facts about how guilds started. What did survive was mostly myths and rumors, but Ash was able to dredge out what he believed to be facts. When the world was new, was the common wording and even after giving it a lot of study, all Ash could say was that at least fifteen thousand years before a war happened. Most the books say that it was between the humans and demons, but the few books that he found that dealt more in facts never said demons but instead said creatures born of nightmares. One might think that demons would be the same thing, but later on he even found a few stories about a demon hero who had fought in the war. Once again, most the books said humans, but the older ones said great races banded together to fight against the threat, but were found lacking. Preying to the gods, their voices were heard and the gods blessed the heroes with skills that suited them. The heroes trained those under them in the same skills. So that no one hero would get too strong, the gods limited the skills a single person could learn and thus jobs were created.
If it had been his previous life, Ash would have laughed at the idea of a god, but after how he was brought to this world he didn’t find it so farfetched. Though Ash didn’t find very much useful information about guilds, he did see how much the world had changed over their years. The older the book was, the more it talked about the great races, but the newer the book, the more they pushed human supremacy. It took a very large jump after the demon wars and while people of the beast tribe fought with the humans, they lost a great deal of their numbers and soon were pushed into the back of society.
Ash wanted to read more, but even though Emelia had a very large collection of books with a number of them so old that they had rebound a number of times, it was still only one noble’s personal library. Thankfully, books were not as expensive as Ash thought they would be. It seemed that paper was easily made thanks to alchemy and was often one of the first things they learned to make. Thanks to that, paper was cheap and easy to acquire. However, books that ran contrary to the government were often destroyed which mean the older books were rare outside of personal libraries. Ash quickly began to understand that the history had been changed over and over so that only the gods truly knew the truth anymore.
“Tring.”
The welcomed sound came after Ash absorbed the second ogre.
[You have reached the required absorption level for the Mountain Ogre. Abilities available; Iron Stomach (passive), Iron Strike (active).]
“Tring.”
[You have been awarded Iron Stomach randomly.]
[Iron Stomach: for each ounce of iron you eat your strength will raise by 1 but at the same time your intelligence will be reduced by 1.]
“What the hell is that?” Ash asked when he saw the description of the ability.
“What?” Halon asked, seeing Ash’s reaction.
“I just got an ability that lets me raise my strength permanently, but at the cost of my intelligence,” Ash said, still flabbergasted.
“I don’t know if that is good or not,” Halon said scratching his head. “Well whatever, better to have it and never use it then need it and not have it.”
“I guess, hopefully the other one is better,” Ash replied.
“They have two abilities that you can steal,” Lillanis said smiling. “That is good, killing a few dozen more will be good practice.”
“You just want the gold that the guild will pay for their horns,” Halon whispered under his breath.
“What was that?” Lillanis asked, narrowing her eyes as she looked at Halon.
“Nothing, I was just commenting on Ash’s new skill,” Halon quickly replied, a small bead of sweat formed on his forehead.
“It is already late, don’t you think we should take a break for the day?” Jacob asked after he picked up the spoils.
“What are you talking about? We can still get a few more kills in today,” Lillanis said, ignoring Jacobs’s suggestion without a second thought.
“She works a poor guy to his bones,” Jacob said with a sigh as he followed behind Lillanis. “Nothing is as scary as a person when gold is in their sights.”
The next fight was against two more ogres and just like before, Ash kept one bust while Lillanis, Halon, and Jacob fought against the other. The ogres were boring to fight for Ash. If it was not for their insane strength and defense, he would find it hard to believe they belonged this deep in the labyrinth.
Jumping to the side to dodge one of the ogre’s overhand strikes, Ash jumped forward, striking the ogre on the knee. It barely scratched its skin and only did fifteen damage. Not only did his attacks do little damage, the wear on his sword was heavy if he attacked over and over. With most the day gone and Ash still have a large amount of his MP and SP remaining, he decided it was time to start training his abilities.
Just like skills, abilities had grades. G grade abilities didn’t have levels. Even if the boost was large, it was still considered a low level ability. F grade abilities had two to three levels. E grade abilities have four to six levels. D grade abilities had seven to ten levels. C grade had eleven to fifteen levels. B grade had sixteen to twenty levels, while A grade abilities had twenty-five levels. There was even a few stories that there were S, SS, and SSS abilities that could break beyond the normal rules assigned to them. Looking at his demon absorption ability, he would guess that it was at least an S or an SS level ability.
The lower levels of a skill were easy to train and just like a person, the higher they got, the more they had to be used in order to level. There were some abilities that Ash had ignored, but after learning about the levels, he decided to train them a little each day until he exhausted his MP and SP.
Since he couldn’t train his passive skills, Ash was forced to focus on his active abilities. He started with the ones he had gained early on. Even if they were weak, they still had a use in a fight.
Invoking Bash, Ash rushed forward and slammed into the ogre, only doing five damage to the ogre and eight to himself. The damage didn’t surprise Ash, as he had done it many times over the past few days as he tried to raise the level of the ability. The great thing was even though an ability got stronger, the cost stayed the same. Though Lillanis had said that some would get more expensive if they leveled up high enough.
As the ogre attacked, Ash invoked Bash again and rushed past its club as he sla
mmed into its leg. As soon as he hit, Ash used Rabbit Punch. His attacks did little damage to the ogre and it didn’t really hurt him, though his hands did start to sting after the sixth hit.
As soon as he used Rabbit Punch, Ash heard the welcomed “tring,” as the ability leveled up.
Before Ash had the chance to use another ability, Jacob struck at the ogre’s exposed neck, dealing a critical hit. Not wanting to waste what little time he had, Ash invoked Poison Spit, hitting the ogre in the eyes as it lurched forward at Jacob’s attack. No matter how strong the skin of the ogre was, its eyes were still weak causing the ogre to bellow in pain. Using its pained state, Jacob struck again, nearly severing its neck from its body.
“Hurry and collect the spoils so we can find the next fight,” Lillanis said before the ogre’s body even hit the floor.
“I can’t Lillanis,” Jacob said slumping to the group. “My SP and MP are both exhausted.”
“We should have bought some potions before entering the labyrinth,” Lillanis said frowning.
“You are the one who made the rule that we don’t buy potions so that we don’t push ourselves. Even if it can recover the SP and MP, it doesn’t do anything for mental and physical fatigue,” Halon said as he sat down beside Jacob.
“Then I guess it is time to head back. Ash, you coming with us or are you staying back to fight a bit more?” Lillanis asked her tone changing back to its normal light heartedness.
“I might as well head back,” Ash replied. “Fighting these guys alone takes far too long,” Ash honestly replied.
“I want spiced rum with dinner tonight,” Jacob said quickly rising to his feet.
Demon Core - #6-2
As soon as they left the labyrinth, Ash parted with the three as they headed back to his house and he headed to Emelia’s.
“Welcome home Lord Hawkwing,” the guard said as he walked up to the manor’s gate. Ever since the wedding, they had quit calling him Ash and it had been replaced by young lord or Lord Hawkwing. It had a nice ring to it, but at the same time it made him feel as if they were pushing him away. He had never spent much time with the guards, but even the maids had started doing it as well, including those that he used to talk with about Yuki.
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