New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Reaching the child demon, Astaroth slashed his weapon at the demon, who looked to the left. But as it looked away, starting to teleport, a flash of light caught its attention.

From the corner of its eye, the demon noticed the weapon in the Ash Elf’s hand had changed from a short sword to a bow. And the grin on the Elf’s face was unmistakable.

As it disappeared, it felt something was wrong.

Reappearing where it had just looked, it spun around to look at the Ash Elf chasing him, only to be met with an arrow glowing with magic power, whose tip was shining even brighter.

The arrow hit the demon child right in the chest, taking little to no damage, but the subsequent explosion that occurred wasn’t as benign.

Astaroth smiled as the damage number popped on his screen.

*3,075*

Calculating his attack’s normal damage, against what went through this time, he ascertained one thing.

‘This demon is at least over the two-hundred and fifty constitution point mark.’

Depending on its level and grade, this could either be big or extremely small. But looking at the health bar of the demon, he erred on the side of extremely small.

It hadn’t even budged. 𝒃𝙚𝙤𝙫𝒆𝒍．𝙘𝒐𝙢

This discouraged him a bit, but he smiled anyway.

‘Now I can hit it, at least.’

But he forgot a minor detail. The demon had been toying with him up to now.

Blasting out of the smoke cloud the explosion created, the demon dashed at Astaroth. On its face, the smirk from earlier was gone.

When it neared him, a wide kick came in from the left, and he had barely enough time to contort his body out of harm’s way, as another attack, a punch this time, came in from the other side, smacking him in the jaw.

*-27,324!*

“Now it’s my turn,” the demon stated.

Astaroth took the attack, feeling like a missile had just used his face as target practice, sending him flying like a cannonball.

*-5,792*

He rammed into the ground, taking a second instance of damage, and bouncing off of it like a rubber ball. After bouncing a few more times, and sliding on the ground for a short distance, Astaroth finally stopped his flight.

His face was numb from the impact, and his body ached all over from being treated like a pinball. But this one attack gave him a ton more info on his enemy.

The speed at which it moved and attacked wasn’t so much higher that he couldn’t react, even though he couldn’t entirely keep up, either. But the power behind the attack itself was no joke.

‘I just had to not get hit, right?’ he thought.

But it was all wishful thinking.

The demon seemed pissed that it received even a single instance of damage, and it wasn’t letting Astaroth off with just one hit of retribution.

Astaroth felt his senses alert him to the demon’s presence to his left, and he quickly pulled out his Ironbark Shield, blocking the attack as best he could.

Although he mitigated a part of the damage with the shield, he hadn’t had time to enhance it, yet, and he hadn’t activated his Mana Skin, either. So the attack still hurt him quite a lot.

*-7,786*

He couldn’t attack with his bow when he had a shield equipped, so he transformed the Ad Astra into its spell-slinger mode, using only one hand to fire spells.

As the impact on his shield knocked him away, Astaroth fired a few Magnetic Bullets, hoping he could try out one of his newly learned spells.

It took him a while to land his first Magnetic Bullet, as the pissed demon was teleporting more often now, and repositioning in angles either hard to hit or in positions to attack him. But once he did, his troubles lessened.

With one Magnetic bullet inside its body, the demon began losing his ability to dodge the attacks launched at him, and couldn’t understand why. And soon enough, it was riddled with small puncture wounds.

Contrary to most demons, Astaroth noticed this one’s wounds weren’t closing as they appeared. He wasn’t sure if the demon was regenerating or not, since he still couldn’t see the health bar ticking down.

But one thing was for sure. Hitting him was now child’s play.

With all the magnetic bullets inside the demon’s body, even when it teleported, the shots Astaroth fired still tried homing on him. Once he judged he had shot enough, he used his Magnet Stone Storm spell to buy himself some time.

The demon’s eyes widened when the two-hundred projectiles suddenly arced up from Astaroth, before circling back down and targeting him. He didn’t know what trick the mortal was using to control them, but it irked it.

As it ran around the village, trying to ditch their pursuit, Astaroth focused on the ground beneath him. Throughout his week-long wait for Silent’s arrival, Astaroth had practiced many things.

One of them was an earth spell. Although his affinity for Earth magic wasn’t very high, his practical experience on low-scale modification of Stone Bullet gave him a moderate understanding of its functioning.

Through this, he was able, with much practice, to develop a new spell for himself.

Shape Stone.

Although the name was quite underwhelming, its uses were plenty. This spell allowed him to model stone in any way he wanted, on a wider range, and change its shape, composition and even density.

Which led him to create a mastery spell barely a day after.

After changing the ground under him to iron, on a radius of around a hundred meters, Astaroth smirked. Lifting his hand toward it, he murmured an incantation.

“Magnetic Platform; Synthetic Gravity.”

The demon, still running around in the village, making the bullets chasing him hit objects as much as he could, to stop them, suddenly felt his body slow down. In a matter of moments, it went from slowing down to completely stopping before jerking back toward the center of town.

As it was pulled through buildings and chariots, amongst other obstacles, he slammed into the ground before Astaroth. It felt like its body mass had suddenly quintupled, and the demon couldn’t budge.

“What have you done?! Release me!”

Astaroth smirked.

“How about no? Wait there for a moment.”

Astaroth wasn’t done. His spell testing was only starting.