Chapter 702 - Violence

Eisen pulled out his Demonic Sword and watched as Satel simply flew into the sky to make way for the fight to properly unfold.

The monster that was currently rushing at Eisen with madness in its eyes now seemed anything but human. Sure, it still had the rough physical form of a human, but it moved in ways that were practically impossible for a normal person to achieve. For one, its joints weren't moving in the way that Eisen expected. Rather than just being able to twist into mainly one direction, the joints of this monster allowed it to twist all of its limbs into any direction that it wanted to.

Hence, it was able to really crawl at Eisen at high speeds and in a rather horrific manner at the same time. The old man readied himself for the moment that the monster would reach him. It was always better to be able to react to an attack rather to be the one that instigated it, as far as Eisen was concerned.

It was hard to change an attack that you were already executing to react to the enemy, but if you didn't start attacking in the first place, it was easier to do what you needed to in order to counterattack and immediately get an edge on your opponent.

And this time around, Eisen's opponent seemed to be one that was driven to madness, practically addicted to committing murder. Eisen could understand how there could be monsters like that. Rather, he was more surprised that he never met anyone like this before, that loved to kill others just for the sake of getting the satisfaction of leveling up more and more. It was something that was probably rather easy to get addicted to in this world.

Whether it was monsters or people, this was something that could affect anyone that roamed through this world. Eisen truly hoped that this would be the last time that he was going to face an opponent like this for the rest of his life, someone that fought just to kill.

Sure, there were plenty of people that chose to get a combat-based occupation simply because they loved to fight, being something like combat-maniacs. Brody was one of those, after all. But he didn't fight because he was addicted to taking lives and growing stronger through it. He fought because he was addicted to the act of fighting itself. He would continue to do so even if it meant that he wouldn't get physically stronger at all anymore. Those people were fun to fight, and Eisen had similar feelings to them sometimes.

But in the case of this madness-driven monster, Eisen could only feel disgust. He saw that the monster pushed itself off the ground to jump at Eisen, and immediately proceeded to swing his blade at the monster, making it grow larger to increase the range of his attack in a way that the monster couldn't expect.

Immediately, the old man managed to hit the monster. He figured that this fight would be over already, considering that he hit it basically head-on, but to the old man's surprise... That simply wasn't the case. Not a single drop of blood flowed down Eisen's blade. Although it obviously should have, if he really sliced through the monster.

But different to what Eisen expected, rather than cutting through the monster, the monster simply grabbed onto Eisen's blade while it was jumping, and was now crawling down it to get to Eisen. Obviously it would only take a single moment for it to reach Eisen, so he had to think fast. And that resulted in Eisen quickly increasing his size and throwing the, now also a fair bit larger, blade into the air. Just before Eisen's fingers split off of the handle, he gave the blade the command to shrink down to the minimum size possible while Eisen himself also shrunk down again.

Like this, the monster was thrown off and was now flailing in the air while Eisen waited for his sword to come back down to him. Luckily, as it was an ego-item, it was able to slightly control itself within the air to come back more quickly, and of course safely, to Eisen's palm. Eisen watched as the Monster started it descent back to the ground and prepared to really hit it this time around. 

He infused the blade with flames that would certainly be too hot to hold onto, even if it didn't do much direct damage to the monster's HP.

Eisen watched the monster fall and swung his blade at the exactly right time. Or so he thought. Somehow, the monster was twisting in a way that allowed it to perfectly dodge the edge of Eisen's sword although it was on a direct path to it at first.

This monster was far more agile and intelligent than Eisen thought it was at first. He stared at the monster with a deep glare and tried to figure out what was going to happen next.

Even if the monster was able to dodge Eisen's blade, it would still have received extreme damage from that fall just now. There was no way that it would have been able to get out of there without any sort of damage at all, at least.

But the monster was still moving somewhat normally. It had some of its bones broken, sticking out of its skin in a rather horrid way, but it simply pushed those back into the right position as if nothing was wrong with them in the first place. After hearing some bones cracking and crunching, Eisen knew that the wounds of the monster were healing at a rather rapid pace. Which made sense. A monster that only lived for killing had to be prepared for anything that could end up killing it as well.

But before the monster could continue to really try to attack Eisen, the old man swung his blade back down at it, hoping to finally hit it this time. But it simply dodged. Attack after attack after attack, Eisen wasn't able to hit with any of them. It was starting to annoy him quite a bit, actually.

For some reason, though, no matter how often Eisen was swinging his blade at the monster, it never tried to counter-attack. Was it waiting for Eisen to tire himself out? It would have to wait a long time for that to happen.

But maybe... Eisen could play along and make it drop its guard. For the next couple of minutes, Eisen continued to swing his sword at the monster, pretending as if he was slowly but surely running out of breath. The monster seemed happier the more that it noticed this, so Eisen figured that his guess was correct. As such, only a couple minutes later, Eisen pretended as if he was unable to go on fighting at this pace and tried to move back to take a breather.

Just as that happened, the monster tried to attack Eisen, taking advantage of a 'slip-up' on Eisen's side. Or so it thought. The monster was rather confident in that it would be able to kill Eisen like this, preparing to press its claws into the old man's throat and chest. But only a moment before the monster hit him, Eisen heated his body up to the highest degree that he could, obviously hurting this monster.

But it was unable to dodge at this point, with Eisen's large body and the confidence that it jumped at him with. The monster burnt its disfigured, somewhat human-like hands on Eisen's body, bubbles forming immediately that seemed to hurt quite a lot. The monster let out a loud screech as it only concentrated on this damage. This was enough for Eisen to swing his sword down at the monster one more time, and before it even hit the ground, the old man cut through a good portion of its body, which was now laying on the ground, separate to the monster's 'main' body.

It was obviously heavily injured, but it still somehow managed to get away. It still had both of its legs, only loosing the left side of its body, including its shoulder up to its hip. Eisen hoped he would be able to get a good hit on it, but it was moving so randomly at the end there that it was nearly impossible to actually get that done.

The monster glared at Eisen angrily, even more keen to kill him, but in Eisen's mind, the fight was already basically over. After all, the Monster was moving incredibly sluggishly and in an even wilder way than before. It had the intelligence to think about what it was doing to an extent before, but now, all of that was gone and had been replaced by raw, powerful anger.

And Eisen used this fact to swing at the monster and continue hacking it apart, making sure that it was really going to die. As Eisen learned when going through the different realms before, these souls reacted differently to combat to the souls in heaven or even in limbo. Rather than being able to be put back together, these souls were incapable of regenerating beyond what they were capable of doing in life.

Simply put, they could really die a second time, which would trap their souls in an infinite nothingness, as far as he was explained by Satel before. Since that was something so horrible that Eisen wouldn't wish it upon anyone or anything, he figured he should do something else.

He cut through the center of this soul's body, right through the soul's core, and had his black Demonic Sword absorb it completely, merging this murderous, violent soul with the ones that Eisen had already gathered in this way in the other realms. Eisen wanted to make sure that the central soul that he used for the blade would be able to safely absorb the other souls without being overwhelmed, so he didn't instantly fuse them together yet, only storing them in the same central core.

The blade's soul was doing a rather good job at this, really, and it happily accepted the soul that Eisen offered to it this time as well.

As the monster's body slowly disappeared in black dust, the gate on the other side of the Arena slowly opened up as Satel landed next to Eisen.

"How surprising. That actually seemed rather close this time around." The Guide-Devil pointed out. Eisen turned his head toward them and shrugged, "It wasn't particularly powerful, just very agile. It had great control over its own body. But beside that, it didn't have much to speak for it, really."

And with that, Eisen made his way through the gate to face his next opponent in this realm.