Arlosse was left wearing a smile of pain. He had even closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to keep looking at the massive, ungrateful arse of the white horse.

In truth, it was hard for him to reconcile with the fact that the damned creature had actually ditched him just like that. He felt used and cast away like a…

“Seriously? Have you no shame?” Arlosse barked at the creature. It didn’t hear him.

The Incarnate had been wrong. His hopes for a loyal steed vanished with his image of the horse. It sunk into the thickets of what remained of the fighting between the demons and humans across the hot battlefield.

When he first heard of the Bond System, Arlosse had been elated. Sure, he hadn’t known exactly what kind of companions he could get after the hinted grueling conditions that needed to be met to earn the favor of any living being, but not having to fight alone was a beautiful prospect to look forward to.

In hindsight, Arlosse had severely underestimated how hard it was to bond with an intelligent creature. He only just now began considering that each type of intelligent creature had special conditions he needed to meet that went beyond his own biases.

The Hollow Demonling had thought healing the horse’s ghastly wound would surely earn him some loyalty, but it really didn’t. That must not have been that valuable of a service to the horse as a price for its loyalty. Perhaps it would have been enough for a squirrel.

Arlosse sighed.

‘I hope he doesn’t get himself killed at least,’ he thought.

He turned his attention behind him, where Castor was still struggling with the manic demons, screaming and stumbling. He stabbed a few but they kept coming.

This had gone on long enough. Thankfully, the hilarious ruckus hadn’t called on the attention of many enemies as Arlosse had expected. But then again, so many humans and demons had died already. The battlefield almost looked deserted if not for the piles of corpses.

Arlosse retrieved the Fickle Viper from his Hermetic Vault and walked towards the horde of demons chasing after his exposition machine.

It barely took Arlosse half a minute to kill them all.

Castor plopped to the ground, sweaty and pale after the threats were gone. He was relieved and not at all surprised that Arlosse had killed his kin without a second thought. Well, neither was Arlosse.

Even though he had yet to decide which side he would join between humans and demons, he had the feeling that even among demons themselves, Scatter Bloods weren’t so valuable that killing them would warrant too much judgment. What was likely to cause problems was killing them to save a human life.

There weren’t any humans or demons close by, spectating, though.

‘There might be some using some surveillance Kanva or Far Ji, but oh well… I’ll meet them when they come for me.’ It wasn’t confidence that drove the Hollow Demonling’s words.

There was little he could do about some things. A part of him even pinched him with the thought that the invisible assailant who poisoned him earlier could be watching, and so far, he had no answer to his powers.

“Get up. We have to go. I don’t want to be too far away from the action,” he said as he dragged Castor up. The young man looked like a boy who had spent the day playing in the dirt. He was exhausted.

Arlosse pushed him while keeping an eye on the surroundings.

It might have sounded strange that he wanted to draw closer to where the fighting was thickest, but Arlosse maintained that lacking information on the status quo was the greatest disability any expert could face.

He knew that this battlefield was a dummy. There was another battlefield somewhere else, close to the location of the Last Shard. How the battle ended on this side likely determined or revealed how things were going over on that side.

‘I doubt anything will be decided without my input though,’ Arlosse thought. ‘Like the last Floor, I’ll probably have some role to play with this Shard.’

For the next few hours, the Hollow Demonling and the young warrior from the Von Hide family quickly and carefully chased after the major spots where the conflict was thickest. They made sure to avoid large groups. Where necessary, Arlosse even split off from Castor temporarily to avoid suspicion. He made sure to reinforce the idea that if Castor tried to run, it wasn’t all too difficult to kill him, even from a distance.

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Of course, Castor was already aware. Arlosse’s Fickle Viper could extend to take lives from impressive distances.

The Incarnate also spent the majority of this roaming time healing his other wounds. He managed to heal the deep stabs on his back and the wound Bash Brain had left on his leg with Tenyen’s throw a while back. The stinging from it had grown unbearable even if he could his leg just fine.

Arlosse had meant to heal the ghastly wound running across his face too; he had earned it from one of Alabas’ Immaterial Slash. He decided against this, however. The flesh on the wound had closed in on itself and it wasn’t bleeding anymore. There weren’t any signs of infection either – likely another perk of being a demon.

‘I’ll leave this as is to honor that damned king,’ Arlosse thought.

Even though he had done Alabas a favor by killing him, the King had done so much more for him. Just granting the Incarnate a name was already extremely valuable, but Alabas had given Arlosse a few other gifts – the Immaterial Slashes, the Soaring Severing technique, and quite some insight into what it meant to be King.

The Hollow Demonling wanted to remember that first lesson towards his desired path as the Hateful Demon Tyrant.

Arlosse also harassed Castor for information when things weren’t too tense.

He wanted more elaboration on the taboo – Sorcery.

He had so many questions.

Were the parallel entities – the Fiends and their Omens – related to the world? To Arlosse that was the only explanation he could find for why Sorcery seemed to mesh with Spirit Essence at all. The inescapable darkness Marar’bel cast on the Ainfidd Kingdom was powered for millennia using the Spirit Essence stored in the Hermetic Vault (when it was still in Marar’bel’s possession).

Arlosse wondered about the connection between the Abundant Radiance and the Verdance and what Clerics even were.

And then there was the thing he had hinged on when it came to demons, about how they apparently benefitted greatly from Sorcery.

Castor answered all these questions, however reluctantly.

“Spirit Essence isn’t something native to our world. It runs across all worlds, though in different forms. Wherever the Omens came from, they must have used Spirit Essence too,” was his answer to Arlosse's first question.

As for the second, there was no succinct way to distinguish between the Verdance and Abundant Radiance.

“The world has a consciousness, but it comes in two forms. The consciousness of its body – the land, skies, and seas – and the consciousness of its inner being, what we call a soul. The Verdance is the awareness of the world’s soul. It is this awareness that then produces the Abundant Radiance, humanity’s trump card for healing and growth. It is also a power that guides us against evil and against most demons. But since it's too powerful in its raw form, even for most humans, a select number of people are chosen to wield and pass on its effects to the rest of pure living-kind.”

“So, the Abundant Radiance is a direct counter to the powers of the parallel entities, is it? Sorcery, I mean,” Arlosse had said to this answer.

“Yes,” said Castor with a frown. He quickly found his snark as time passed. His confidence was returning. “And you demons weren’t equipped with the power to handle the Abundant Radiance from the start, unlike us. When you indulge in Sorcery, you become stronger. That’s how Dark Bloods are born.”

Arlosse’s third question was answered, but he found himself with a fourth now.

“Why were demons made like that? Couldn’t the Verdance have at least made demons immune to the sway of Sorcery? Why punish us… them, for how it designed them?” he had asked.

Castor scoffed.

“Only a demon would dare question the Verdance,” he had said.

Arlosse had forced the young man to fight off some of the enemies that caught them together right then.

The two had been sneaking close to one of the few larger battlefields left. Terrible pressures were flaring and clashing there, almost inexhaustible. Arlosse had every intent to stay clear of whoever was unleashing such waves. Thus, he had moved around with Castor near what might have been offshoots of this distant, lively battleground.

Luckily, the people who found them together were mere grunts. Demons and humans alike reacted viscerally to the two. Arlosse pushed Castor to slay them all. There weren’t that many anyway.

It wasn’t an easy decision for Castor, since some of them were human. Even though they were screaming things like traitor, demon sympathizer, and coward, with every intent to hack him to pieces, he struggled to brandish his dagger against them.

Arlosse could almost sympathize.

Killing demons was easy to reconcile with for Castor, but his own kind…

In the end, Arlosse left him to make a choice. He fended off some of the other humans and demons on one side and left Castor alone. He wanted to see what the young warrior would do.

Would he fight against the human enemies?

Would he try to explain that he wasn’t following Arlosse of his own accord?

Would he just lay down his dagger and die?

Perhaps Arlosse did this to find his own answer for which side to devote himself to in this war.

Maybe that was how the first phase of this floor would end.

While easily beating the enemies that shrieked and cried as they attacked him, Arlosse kept his attention on Castor.

‘What will you do?’ he thought.

The young man opted for neither of the three choices Arlosse expected.

Before a grizzled-looking man with straw-colored hair sliced him in half with a scimitar, Castor wore a strange, strained smile, glanced at Arlosse…. and simply vanished into thin air.

Or perhaps… he simply turned invisible.