Eiro took a long, deep breath as he let his mana flow through his body. It was a quite relaxing feeling and helped him get into a meditative state pretty quickly. And as he did, Eiro made sure to enhance his senses as much as he could.
He manipulated them to the extreme, making it so that he was practically only able to see what was going on in a five-meter radius around him, with everything else being a black void in comparison. And the Demon took on the right stance.
A few moments later, something came out of that black void, but seemed to practically disappear the next instant. But this time, Eiro was able to actually able to keep that figure in his perception. It was the wooden puppet, which Eiro was currently training with.
It's been a while since he dedicated some time to it, and he figured he should finally get to finishing up all the different modes with the two-token setup. He managed to complete all the other combinations already, now he just had to finish up with all the ones where the puppet was hiding itself from the Demon while doing other things.
Right now, it was in the 'hidden' hand to hand combat mode, and it didn't hesitate to attack Eiro aggressively when it was like this. However, by sensing every little thing in this area, whether it was the flow of the air, small pebbles on the ground, and just the bit that Eiro could actually sense of the puppet itself, Eiro was able to react to the puppet's movement. To make it 'fair' and to be true to his training, Eiro even deactivated his 'ultimate domain of truth' for this, so that he couldn't simply analyze what the puppet was doing first and then react like that. Eiro wanted to react according to what he sensed, not what he thought was going to happen next.
It was certainly incredibly hard, but the good thing about hand to hand combat was that it required direct physical contact. As Eiro knew the puppet's moves perfeclty already, he was able to react once even slight contact was made.
Since this combat style relied a lot on grappling, at some point, it was actually not all too necessary to have immense perception once either the puppet grabbed onto Eiro, or Eiro grabbed onto the puppet, as he could simply go from the basis of touch, something that even the puppet was unable to hide completely.
And so, from there on, it was basically just like the regular combat, and Eiro was able to take the puppet down surprisingly quickly.
Once the puppet admitted defeat and Eiro officially passed this mode, the first of the three stealth-based modes he yet had to complete, Eiro spread his perception back out to normal and reactivated his ultimate domain of truth.
"Perfect." Eiro grinned broadly, "Seems like it's finally working ou-"
"What the hell was that? It looked like you had a stroke..." A voice said from one side of the training area. Eiro turned toward them and sighed at Ariella, "I was training, what else. With this puppet here." The Demon said bluntly, but Ariella still seemed a bit confused at what Eiro was talking about.
Eiro held his hand to the side to point at the puppet as it slowly appeared there next to him, having used an incredible level of stealth to hide from the Demon. The Nephilim looked at the wooden figure confused, "Wait, what is that? I've never seen that around here..."
"Yeah, because I usually make sure that the stealth and hand to hand combat tokens are active, so that it can cover the perimeter more easily and stop people from coming in. Obviously."
"I think it's not as obvious as you think it is..." Ariella pointed out, "Ignoring what that thing actually is, why have I never seen you practice with it before?"
Eiro thought about it for a moment as he approached Ariella, "I've been pretty busy lately, so I haven't really been practicing with it at all. But I feel like at this point I'm powerful to get through all of the modes at once, so I figured I should get through it quickly now and finish this aspect of my training."
"Huh... Is it really that hard?" Ariella asked, looking at the puppet. It didn't really seem like it was all that powerful and tough to beat.
Eiro rolled his eyes and snapped his finger. In that moment, the puppet disappeared out of sight once more, and just a few seconds later, Ariella felt her body restrained as she was standing up, without any chance to defend herself. The puppet reappeared and Eiro looked at the Nephilim with a smile on his face, "It is pretty tough, huh? You might be able to beat it when it's using just hand to hand combat or dagger mastery, but certainly not when it's combined with stealth like this. This mode was specifically created to help me practice the limits of my perception. Nobody else has a chance against this." Eiro explained to Ariella, as the puppet jumped off of her.
She held her chin, since the puppet held onto it as he was restraining her, and then looked at it, "Then why isn't it just-"
"Obviously because it can't do any damage to others. No real damage, at least, not like you or me, or even my kids. It can hurt others, but the damage to health is minimal." Eiro explained to Ariella, surprised that she didn't know about how this kind of thing worked herself. Although to be fair, she didn't seem to know too much about the concept of life force.
Eiro looked at the puppet and grinned a bit as he switched the hand to hand combat token out with the dagger mastery token, "Anyway, you don't have anything else to do? I don't think you really left this place at all since you've been here, right?"
"Well, what am I supposed to do? I achieved my goal of finding the holy priestess, but at the same time, I can't proceed with that, since she's your daughter. I basically have to wait for you to become strong enough now."
"Oh..." Eiro said with a wry smile, "Right. We'll... get there soon, don't worry. Solomon let me know that we can enter the prison in two days, and I already told Koperia about it as well. After that I'll level up quite a bit, since 'the Death' is amongst the oldest royals, so it should give me a lot of experience when killing it. So by the time we get to the spring equinox, we should be ready to go."
Ariella looked back at Eiro, "Why specifically the spring equinox?"
"Hm? Oh, I just have a close connection to the solstices and equinoxes, so I think along those lines a lot."
"Right. And then once we get to the spring equinox, we can go kill 'the devil'?" Ariella asked, and Eiro scratched the back of his head, "No, not really. Since we have no proper way to track him. Around the spring equinox, there's a two week vacation period for the students at school, which should be enough for me to get to the Holy Empire's capital and back with James, Jess and Krog. We'll take care of the thing I promised to James there, and then we'll go and find a certain village that I passed through eight years ago. It was a place for 'the Devil' to experiment, so it should give us some clues at least."
"What, a village near the Holy Empire's capital city is a testing ground for the the devil? That seems kind of..." Ariella pointed out, surprised to hear information like this, and Eiro immediately nodded his head, "It sounds weird, right? That kind of thing is exactly the Devil's sense of humor."
Eiro slowly turned around and made his way back to the center of the training field, "You can think about if you want to come along, you still have time to make that decision until we actually leave for the Holy Empire. But for now... Let me keep practicing a bit." The Demon suggested, calling over the puppet.
Ariella nodded her head, already deep in thought as she was contemplating whether or not she should come along for that. For the most part, it seemed like an obvious answer, but it still wasn't the sort of decision you could make without at least spending a little time to think about it.
And while the Nephilim was busy with that, Eiro continued his practice with the puppet. He gave a dagger to it and took up his stance, limiting his perception in the same way as he did before to get ready for whatever attack was to come first.
This time around, Eiro would need to be a lot more careful than before. The style for dagger mastery was obviously mostly relient on slashing and quick stabbing while quickly moving around, and barely any physical contact, so Eiro needed to focus more on the puppet through his other senses than touch. But at the same time, that meant that Eiro knew he could reduce the strength of his sense of touch, to instead strengthen his other senses. Eiro had already done the same with his sense of taste, as he quite obviously wouldn't end up needing it in this fight.
And just like that, Eiro continued practicing with the wooden puppet.
