Nevil quickly scanned the large group of imps and turned to Tristan and said “There are little over two hundred imps. I can handle a half on my own. Tristan split the other half with Garius, don’t take too many it’s best we greet the Lord as soon as possible.”
Tristan in turn said,”Very well, Garius-sama i will take about fifty seven imps you can take forty-three imps.”
Nevil once again turned to the group of imps, he raised his cane up into the air. From the gem a large number of lights of white, red, and black appeared each landing on an imp creating a bright floating mark above each individual imps. The left half of the room was comprised of entirely white marks, while the right half was comprised of red and black marks with those marked in black being closer to the stage.
Tristan clapped his hands and two doors to the right side swung open each revealing a beautiful black haired maid behind it.
Nevil walked of the stage and yelled,”All imps marked in red follow me!”
He walked towards a door on the right, and waited for the imps to follow before opening it . But before continuing on he turned to the little girl and said,"Ojou-sama i will be taking my leave then.
Tristan made his way to the little girl's side, and knelled down saying,”Ojou-sama, your humble servant would like ask that you would come with me.”
The girl nodded and walked off the stage with Tristan, and in a similar fashion said,”All imps marked in black follow me.”
And finally Garius, who for some reason was still flexing his proud muscles, and he too got off the stage and walked towards the doors. He got there and motioned Satou’s group ,the imps marked in red, to follow him.
Garius turned to look at the maid, and without a word she bowed and quickly walked ahead down the hallway. At the one of the corners of the hallway there was a door to a cylindrical room with a sign saying, [Latus Archive].
Garius and the maid walked into the room and the rest of the imps follow suit. Inside the circular room was a large number of books that lined the walls reaching to the roof, which seemed to be several floors high. A massive diamond shaped crystal was floating above being Illuminated by several bright balls of light that moved every now and then, that were strong enough to fill the entire room with bright light.
Scattered throughout the room were a number of odd contraptions; for example, this one machine that resembled a pendulum. Though really it was just a metal rod attached to a table with metal, and hanging from that is a string with a black crystal attached to the bottom of it, while a blue crystal was on top of the entire piece. Other than that, there was something that looked like one of those old bulky printing presses, except there were no characters or words on any moveable types or the like.
While in the center of the room there was a large wooden desk with several large stacks of papers, books, and a single crystal similar to the one floating above except far smaller in size. The one sitting on the chair behind the desk was another skeleton with a ram skull , who was reading a book. Except this skeleton had ten arms in total, with two of his arms on his body like they should be, while the rest were floating doing various chores.
Garius said cheerfully, ”It’s been a while Heid!”
The skeleton man named Heid looked up, and said, ”Yes, it’s been a total of thirty-four years, ninety-days, twenty-six minutes, and fifty-one seconds since I’ve seen you Garius. You should stop by more often.”
“Ahaha... I remember why i don’t talk to you now,” Garius remarked
“You’re here to register the next generation into the Latus Archives and perform an Aptitude Exam, correct?”, asked Heid, who couldn't care less about Garius’ remark.
“Yep, as expected of you! Well, I'll leave it to you then. I’m sure you can do it faster than me, since you're always here for no reason, I'll owe you one!”, Garius laughed as he dumped all the work onto Heid.
“Very well then,” Heid agreed not even bothering to argue with Garius. He knew better than that. He closed the book he was reading, and moved one of his floating arms to fetch another book from one of the bookshelves. He opened the book and ripped a single brown page right out, with a faint outline of a circle that could hardly be seen.
Heid looked at the group and signaled one of the imps over. An imp walked over to him and he ordered the imp to give him his hand.
The imp complied, and Heid took the imp's hand and with one of his fingers and poked a hole into it. The imp panicked, but with Heid’s strong grip, not intending on letting him go. He didn't mind the ruckus the child was causing, and just simply moved the bloody finger onto the parchment, letting it soak up his blood.
After a second or so, the faint circle turned a bloody red and oddly enough, parts that should have been stained by blood weren’t. But only the outline of the circle had changed.
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Heid moved the imp's hand off the paper, and sent it to the pendulum-like machine using one of his floating arms. He dragged the imp's hand over to the small floating crystal on his desk, and held it there for a bit.
When the it’s hand touched the crystal, he began screaming in pain, and the crystal began to glow. A translucent blue line was visible between each of the blue crystals. Soon enough, the black crystal on the pendulum was lowered, and it began scribbling something onto the paper.
After a few moments, the imps stopped screaming and a few seconds after that the black crystal stopped. Heid fetched the parchment from the machine with his other arm and looked at it, letting go of the imp's hand. Heid turned to Garius and said, ”Rank 3, Lesser Demon. Race: Blood Imp. Nameless. Sin: Wraith. Soul: Fragmented. Potential: Red, Above-Average. Anti-Seal Rate: Negligible. Next!”
Heid, put the paper back in the book and it magically reattached itself. He flipped through some pages, and then ripped out another page and repeated the process as Garius watched not saying a word. Each time Heid would poke the imp to let out blood, move their hand to the crystal causing them to scream, and the pendulum would write out the results.
Satou, feeling just a little bit curious, turned to Garius and asked him, ”What’s he doing?”
Garius was a bit surprised, and with a bewildered expression asked, ”You can talk!?”
“Yeah?”, replied Satou
Garius paused for a few seconds to regain his composure and answered, ”Well you see, Heid is one of the clan’s record keepers, and this is one of the four [Latus Archives]. Do you see that crystal up there?”
Garius pointed up at the large crystal floating above, ”That’s a [Latus Crystal], they are extremely common in the Demon Realm and posses a variety of uses. The one here is used for storing Life force. And as long as you are alive the life force in the crystal will remain, allowing us to keep track who is dead and alive. And if anyone ever betrays us we can locate them to a certain extent. As to what Heid’s doing, he’s testing your abilities using the life force stored in that crystal, and writing it in pages marked with a seal of blood. The life force stored inside a Latus Crystal holds a large amount of information, however, only a few people can directly read it, so we have to use that machine over there to write it out for us. What's it called again Heid?"
Heid who was holding one of the screaming imps hand onto the Latus crystal looked to Garius and said, "A Latus Transcriber."
Garius continued, "Yeah, that. It takes the information and writes it onto the pages with a magic crystal for us to read. It also establishes a connection to the Latus crystal up there using the seal. So whenever we need to update the information we only need to use a crystal to absorb some more of your life force and the seal will automatically update the text."
“Oh,” Satou replied
'Well that’s something. It seems like the Demon Realm has some interesting things, and Garius doesn't seem to be just a brute. Oddly he seems to show some understanding of things, unlike what his appearances suggest,' Satou thought
The process continued on and on and on, eventually, the one-odd-imp-with-the-tattoo's turn came.
Heid took her hand and poked a hole allowing blood to soak into the page once again. Continuing the process he moved her hand to the small Latus crystal. The process continued until Heid got the results from the transcriber like usual, but when he did, he just stared at dumbfounded.
Heid looked at Garius and said, ”Garius... this is…..”
“What?”
Heid slowly turned his head to the paper in his trembling hands and said, “R-Rank 7, Lesser Demon. Race: Fey Species, Variant Bloody Fairy. Name: Maria. Sin: Lust and Greed. Soul: Chimera. Potential: Light Blue, Nobel-Tier nearing King-Tier. Anti-Seal Rate: 38%!”
Garius broke into a laughter, and screamed ”A Genius!”
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Okay, so i had a little spark of inspiration for what i should do in regards to these tests. I had something else for this part, but i didn't like it. But with a spark of inspiration i came up with this. I like it better so I'm keeping it. Again Editor is MIA. For all those who didn't notice Chapter 6 was edited after i read it over again yesterday and no longer liked it. So if you didn't check that out i suggest you do so. Well if you have any questions, suggestions, or noticed any problems feel free to tell me.