Demon's Virtue

Just a few hours after they started the subjugation request to take down a few of the Ground-Crawlers spreading out in the forest, the party, plus Bavet and Gobo, managed to kill roughly ten times as many as were required in the request. And at this point, there were two news that Eiro was rather happy to hear.

"Yes! Finally! Level 100!" Jess exclaimed happily as she grasped her staff tightly, and Eiro looked at her with a light smile on his face underneath his mask, "Congrats. Then I guess we can have you change your class after we head back to town."

"Hehe, alright~! Ah, and you said to choose the Apprentice classes for the specific elements one after another for now, right?" Jess asked curiously, and while the Demon squatted down and extracted the venom from the Ground-Crawler Jess just killed, he looked back up at her, "Yes, that's exactly it." Eiro replied quickly, and Krog turned toward Eiro with a curious expression.

"So, why is that, really? Wouldn't it be possible to get stronger much quicker if we just choose higher-tier classes? It's been proven that the growth-rate of those is higher, even if they're harder to level up, right?" The heavy warrior asked, and Eiro simply let out a deep sigh.

"I already explained it before, didn't I? Jess should get abilities that make it easier to control each specific element from those. And since you keep the abilities from former classes, once she goes through all four specialized mage-apprentice classes, she should choose the 'Apprentice Elemental-Mage' class that she apparently unlocked before. That one should give her an ability to make it easier to manipulate all elements, and combined with the specific abilities from the apprentice ones, the effect will be much stronger. It's the same with the stats, they're going to add onto each other much more to give you higher stats in the end."

"Yeah, I get that." Krog replied immediately, "But wouldn't it be quicker to choose higher-tier classes to get a stronger base, and then choose the lower-tier classes to rush through them?"

Eiro didn't even have to think about that too long. That was because he was under such an assumption before himself, although he soon found out why that wasn't the case, after reading a few special books and connecting the information he got through that with the things he was told by Jura before. "In theory, sure. Just considering these basic things, though. As you said yourself, classes have different tiers. The class 'Apprentice Fire Mage' will be of the same tier as the class 'Apprentice Water Mage', but of course they will both be of a lower tier than the simply 'Fire Mage' and 'Water Mage' classes. Those, in turn, are of a lower tier than the 'Pyromancer' and 'Hydromancer' classes. And whenever you have a class of a specific kind, the kind being 'Mage' in this example, all classes that are on a lower-tier than that class will become harder to level up and will give less growth-benefits while doing so. At some point, you wouldn't even be able to switch to lower-tier classes anymore. An Archmage can't return to being an apprentice mage. So just get the lower-tier classes out of the way first." Eiro explained as quickly and easily graspable as he could, and it seemed like everyone did understand him with that.

The demon picked up the corpse of this last Ground-Crawler and added it to the bag that the group was using to haul them back to the guild in a bit, "How far along is everyone else?" He asked, and everyone slowly opened their statuses in response to that question, letting Eiro grasp all the information immediately.

James was surprisingly far away from reaching level 100 compared to the others, being level 97 right now. Krog was at level 98, and both Gobo and Bavet both were at level 99.

"It's still pretty early... Gobo, Bavet, you two, Lugo and I will stay here and hunt for a little longer. Jess, James, Krog, you three can go ahead and get back to town already. I'll give you my guild card, so hand the request in properly." Eiro said before he held the small, thin card over toward the three party members.

Quickly, James grabbed it and nodded his head, "Got it. Come to the place we rented when you're done, we have to get things ready for the move so we'll head back there afterward." The Light Elf told Eiro, who just nodded his head.

"Sounds good. Then I'll see you later." Eiro told them, and the three party members slowly started to make their way through the forest to get back to town. It shouldn't take them too long now, and since it was still just afternoon, they had a bit of time left for now anyway.

"Err... What exactly are we going to fight now? More of these bugs?" Bavet asked annoyedly, and Eiro immediately just shrugged, "We'll just hunt whatever we can find. So if that means we're hunting more Ground-Crawlers all night because we can't find anything else, then so be it."

Eiro could simply feel Bavet radiate annoyance right now, although he didn't really care. All they had to do for now was hunt more monsters so that they could increase their level some more. Eiro himself managed to level up to level 4 after killing all of the ground-crawlers that he took on himself. The stat points that he got from leveling up so far, Eiro quickly invested into his stats completely randomly, to finally follow his long-overdue plan of making his stats seem a bit more 'natural' in case he encountered someone with some sort of appraisal ability.

They would find out he was an Imp either way in that case, but at the very least they wouldn't realize that something was completely wrong and weird with Eiro's stats. It was easier to deal with the information of Eiro being an Imp coming out than it was to deal with people figuring out that Eiro was able to assign his stats however he wanted. At least that's what he figured, he didn't particularly want to find out what was going to happen if this information was leaked somehow.

Either way, for now, the group of four creatures continued their way through the forest, trying to kill whatever they could. Well, at least Bavet and Gobo were killing things. All that Eiro was doing was stand there in case of an emergency, since this was all so that Bavet and Gobo could each level up one more time. Eiro didn't necessarily need to level up right away. Meanwhile, Lugo was simply carrying the bags filled with monster parts that Eiro was filling up after the other two killed them. It would be a waste not to collect them to hand them in at the guild, after all.

And so, they just continued what they were doing for the next few hours, until something happened. Bavet finally stopped moving, as if surprised, and Eiro immediately realized why he did so, "You leveled up, huh?"

"Yup." Bavet replied quickly, so Eiro swiftly pulled out the special metal orb out of his treasury and gave it to Bavet, "Good, then push your mana inside before you choose something."

"Before I choose something? Doesn't it enhance evolutions or somethin'?" The slime asked, and Eiro just shrugged, "I don't know exactly how it works yet, so just try it like this first." Eiro sighed, so Bavet did as asked and pushed his mana into the metal orb. Quickly, he read the notification that appeared in front of him.

"Well, it says that now, my next evolution will be enhanced. So, what now?" Bavet asked curiously, and Eiro slowly looked at Bavet's liquid figure, soon spotting the part where the notification was reflected. He read through the options and then thought about it.

In total, Bavet had three different options. One, the 'Weaponry Slime', which would probably cause an enhancement in the area of combat for Bavet. Then there was the 'Copy Slime'. It seemed like this one would make it possible for Bavet to copy things that he's seen before in much more detail and precision, and possibly even copy abilities. These two things surely seemed pretty useful and strong, but in the end, both Bavet and Eiro were more interested in the third evolution-option.

"It's fine if I go for that one, right? The 'Transformation Slime'..?" Bavet inquired, before Eiro immediately nodded his head without a moment's hesitation, "Of course, go for it." The Demon said wiht a light grin, and Bavet then quickly chose that option.

His whole body wiggled a bit and it seemed like Bavet was feeling a bit weak, as his body was slightly seeping down right now, "All good?" Eiro asked, and the slime simply replied, "Yup... Just somehow don't like the feeling of evolution..."

"Don't worry, it makes sense." Eiro said reassuredly, "After all, technically your body is just the slime core in the center. The rest is just stuff you're controlling. And since the slime core is just a single substance, it will be like every single part of your actual body will change from the grounds up. You think you can transform right now?" The Demon inquired, and Bavet stayed silent for a little while. Parts of his body were changing texture and color, but soon reversed to the base state, so it seemed like that's just how it was.

"Nope... no chance..." Bavet replied, "It's going to take three days, apparently... Three days of this shit? Really?"

"You'll just have to live with it. Don't worry, we can wait for another couple days. Well, anyway, for now I'll split off your core from the rest of your body. I don't want you to suddenly transform into random, dangerous things because you can't control your whole body. You can change it into your new slime after your evolution is over." Eiro said before he pulled out a glass bottle out of his satchel that he then slowly pushed Bavet's core into, similar to how he did it when the two of them first met.

"Urgh... never thought I'd return to this voluntarily... But be careful with my slime, alright? I took care of it super well, so it's really high-quality!" Bavet exclaimed as loudly as he could, although most of his voice was still deafened by the glass bottle. Meanwhile, Eiro just stored the slime in another separate container as tightly as he could. He came prepared for something like this, so it was fine.

Anyway, now that Bavet was also in the process of evolving, there was just one of them left that needed to go start their evolution.. Gobo, the Mountain Hobgoblin.