It took a week of running while enhancing himself with mana to reach the first demon town, and said activity gained him a couple talent points, because apparently capping your skills also granted them, meaning he was indeed going to need to grind a fuck ton of spells if he wanted to get that higher level knowledge. Despite his capability to unlock even intermediary knowledge and train the level of his basic ones by himself, there was no guarantee he’d be able to keep advancing his knowledge like this without some significant boosts to his stats and a lot of life experience, neither of which he was guaranteed to have at moments of need. While saving points was important, saving his life was more important, so again, it was one more thing to leave in his reserves for a rainy day or an emotional outburst like in the fort battle.
Either way, the grayish, militaristic air of the whole thing made him more than convinced to the fact that, were he to actually know how to communicate and posses money of his own, it’d be one of the easiest places to find prostitutes to his taste considering the sheer difference in people and the size of the followers of the military settlement.
As it stood however, there was no chance of that happening. Rather, he was in fact thankful for the opportunity to actually bath after so long on the road. The fact that he had partially regained emotions was good, but the fact that they were mostly his negative reactions to one problem or the other was a pain in the ass. His own was even chafing at this point, and the changes to his body had made him produce a lot less dejects!
Sure, indulging in food, drugs and sex was probably the exact thing he needed to get his mood back in place, but he sure as all hells wasn’t going to be asking for that kind of shit from a princess who was also his only venue of communication with the world around him. Nevermind the fact that his negative emotions made him fear most of the everything this line of action would have him go through, even just plain logic could get him to avoid gaining the fame of being a lecherous bastard to the one person who would judge him most in front of his new boss.
Because in all technicality, he was now a knight scribe of the demon empire, or whatever euphemistic title for death commando operative they had used, and that counted as being a public servant, so his benefits were determined by whatever ministry was responsible for that with some direct oversight from the demon emperor since he had began his 'career' with rather notable achievements to the war effort. Plus the fact that he had practically detonated a flashbang in a princess’ face, but she did say she had forgiven him for that, in a detached and political kind of way that meant it’d be swept under the rug so long as he didn’t bring it up and it was convenient for her to do so.
It was a good thing he had technically saved her life by killing off the two saints, since apparently the fire guy was indeed getting doped out of his ass by some unseen creature claiming to be an angel.
Really, if all it took to get that title was to have golden mana then most Pride and Greed demons would be called angels, and that would get the misslabeling fool tortured to death. Until he saw the managing spirits taking care of this world come down and fuck people up by just existing outside of their scope of perception he wouldn’t be calling anything an angel.
Even then those fucks were either immortal pseudo divinities build with single minded purpose by a being of even higher power or dispersed minds given single tasks and made to act as cheap processor, storage and whatever else was needed to run a planet without it crashing and burning.
More importantly though, from an objective standpoint he was pretty sure he had lucked out getting taken in by the demon's. Not only did they not have a faction like the church to oppose his very existence, but already he had had the chance to distinguish himself despite the problems he'd caused.
With this he had a chance to build the soft power to avoid needing to walk into every trap his enemies might set up for him. He might be good at making up circunstancial strategies, but that would take him so far if he had to use so many that he started repeating himself.
"Alright, I'm set. Is there anything you need while we are in this town?" Asked Sera in western common, who now had much smaller horns that didn't even reach her temple due to whatever disguise magic item she was using.
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"More clothes. Food place go." He replied in fataram.
"Restaurants?" He confirmed, trying to mouth the word. "It's not much, but there should be a few places for visiting nobles we could visit. After Kirian informs the local count of my presence then he should be happy to recommend somewhere." She shrugged, signaling him to follow.
While his learning trait could not activate purely on his idea of whether it'd be beneficial for him or not, he had somehow managed to maintain a steady rhythm of learning, be it because of his improved intelligence or because his new teacher was better.
Much like english, he started learning it better by speaking and discussing certain factoids rather than relying on grammatical clues pointed at by some piece of paper. Which he would still need since he was learning a dead language with little inflection, but still it was working, so he wasn't going to complain before he was forced to mime something too stupid.
Walking the streets to get to a tailor Sera seemed to know, he noted that most people seemed to not pay too much attention to them even as his handler talked to him in western common instead of it's eastern or south-estern variation, which were spoken here and in their allied estate respectively.
On those same streets however, he noted a rather unexpected problem. Basically anyone that didn't look like a common worker was both very hot and also dressed like they expected to kill people at any time.
And he seemed to fit right in despite not being nearly as flashy as any of those who were obviously wizards.
There was like, one or two people actually ogling others, everyone else was like him in that they seemed to go right past arousal and see how that person could indeed crush his skull in her hands or how that guy was flexible and muscular enough to snap his neck in one swift motion. The constant ‘excitement’ was probably not doing either his sexuality or his stress levels any favors, but he was starting to question if indeed there could be people who did not go through this to end up being attracted to people that could kill them after they stopped fantasizing such experiences and actually lived through them.
Which was unlikely to be true, there were all kinds of kinks in the wild, but hell if he wasn't going to judge.
On another point of interest related to well built bodies, he did in fact wonder how there was such dimorphism between gender and subspecies in all of these humans, and curiosity over their gestation habits also reared it’s head due to several things he saw that would not work too well put together, like that imp-spawn and the ogre blooded over there going at it with each other, which he had not doubt happened somewhere somewhen.
A more likely reason, instead of weird breeding habits generating new subspecies, would be that each person had a certain combination of Vil and Sin essence due to differing nature and nurture, which this people were able to express as they grew and developed in a more magically inclined way towards that same magical essence that dominated their bodies. He’d need to ask around later to learn how to properly heal them, but otherwise, it was a minor concern for later.
As he went through all of this in his mind, they suddenly stopped. Looking around, he could see no obvious tailor shop, but there were a few restaurants. Noting the unexpected order of things, he turned to his host, only to see her looking at a crowd of demon kin with a distant look.
Because this was a princess and he hated dealing with stupid politicians, nevermind stupid aristocrats, he immediately decided he wasn't going to be dealing with whatever backstory was there.
Snapping his fingers in front of her face, he immediately got his ‘concerns’ swatted away by a floundering princess. They moved on and he secretly made sure to try to remember at least the horns and faces of the people she’d been looking at. If they were a concern then he’d need to make sure to take them down before they could use whatever advantage they had over the young woman.
Current pseudo depression aside, he wasn’t going to let someone just walk in and fuck over his personal and professional life by unbalancing his tester. If the solution was to distract her by being annoying and friendly then he would do it in a heartbeat. The young woman seemed completely unused to someone trying to act nonchalantly towards her, so that was working well despite their clipped communication, partially because of her intuition guessing his meaning when he tried to communicate and because he had been trying to emulate other people’s body language to be more expressive for years now.
Considering her lack of attempts to blend in with the normal populace despite their current ‘adventurer’ disguise or whatever, he was pretty sure that getting a new wardrobe and demonstrating his manners would create a good contrast to the side of himself he’d shown till now and increase her opinion of him so long as she kept trying to understand him.
To keep that charade going he tried to show his interest in books, art and general fashion, all of which was true, but rather hard to do without sharing a language. He really needed to fucking learn that mock-latin already.