“Wake up, Inori.”
“It was early morning, and a gentle voice woke me from my sleep. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was her smile, and the first thing I heard was a line that I’d heard many times before. It was almost nostalgic. Almost funny. I chuckled. Back then, every day was boring, but at least they were days of peace and happiness. Now, that was but a single page in our story. Even if the life we’d known had fallen apart, I was still so happy to have her by my side. The peaceful life we’d once known was now just a footnote in the life that lay ahead of us. There may come a day when we look back on our time spent together now and think of it as a happy period of our lives. Would she still be by my side then? At the very least, there was one thing I was sure of: if the life we knew once again fell apart, I’d be there to rescue her. With that thought, I shut my eyes again, a new determination filling my chest.”
“...Inori?”
I stayed silent.
“Would you mind not trying to tie everything up neatly with some random monologue?”
“Zzzz.”
“Stop sleeping!”
Sheesh, pipe down. “Why do you keep your master from sleep, whore?”
“Isn’t that kinda harsh?!”
Your shrill voice is the only thing that’s harsh. Detect enhanced my hearing to superhuman levels, so her voice was especially grating on my ears. Oh, also—rest assured that we hadn’t done anything naughty yet.
“It’s morning! Actually—it’s almost noon! Wake up already!”
“You say that, but I just started sleeping. If anything, there’s something wrong with you. Aren’t you a vampire?”
Even though I’m the one who made her a vampire, I’m starting to have my doubts. She was apparently a different kind of vampire from me. Her stats weren’t reduced to a tenth of their nighttime values in the day. She might have been one of those so-called daywalkers? I couldn’t have been more jealous. Not to mention, her stats had also grown ten times their original values from before her transformation. What the actual fuck?
“You may have gone to bed early, but I stayed up all night studying. So go train by yourself.”
“You were just reading books! You call that studying? Sure, I’ve gained a fair few Skills and bits of knowledge from you, but it’d be best to experiment with your guidance. All I’m asking is for you to stay near me.”
“Ugh...”
Even after all the reading I’d done yesterday, I still had no clue what most of my Skills did. There wasn’t an immediate need for me to understand all of them, but after talking with her, I felt more awake. At this point, going back to sleep would be more of a pain.
“Fine. You owe me.” I got up and left the hut with Ariya. By the way, I’d made the hut with Armament Craft. It cost me a lot of MP. Hm? A hut isn’t a weapon, you say? Well, it might look like a dilapidated hut, but it’s actually a fortress. It was equipped with a large range of different and dangerous functions. A fortress wasn’t exactly an armament...but I’d made it with Armament Craft, so whatever. I was just gonna run with it.
“Urgh, I’m still having trouble getting used to flying.”
Ariya was currently practicing flying. She’d need a lot of time to master the use of the wings she’d only recently grown. She needed more time particularly because she couldn’t get Skills on her own. Apparently, becoming a vampire had bestowed her with various different Skills, but she wasn’t able to level them up or gain new ones. It made sense since she was from this world, while her vampirism, as well as its related Skills, were from another.
Also, after becoming my underling, her affinity with dark magic had increased. I’d read that most mages in this world only had two different affinities. In most cases, one affinity would be stronger than the other, and usually they’d be on opposite ends of the elemental spectrum. For instance, if someone had an affinity for fire magic, they’d gain an affinity for water magic too. Apparently, this kept the body’s mana in balance or something. What does that even mean? Could having an affinity for water magic prevent the user from getting hurt when using fire magic? It made no sense to me, particularly since I couldn’t use any magic from this world.
When Ariya was still human, she’d had four affinities: light, dark, wind, and earth. Among those four, light and wind were her strongest, while dark was basically an afterthought. But now it had become about as strong as her light magic. This might have been because of my True Dark Magic, though given that the dark magic of this world and the dark magic that I knew were completely different, I wasn’t sure how likely that was.
The dark magic of this world could be used to cast curses, blind people, and debilitate a target. It was magic that was very effective against living things. My dark magic, on the other hand, was focused on nonliving things. They were completely different.
For the record, though, I think that Ariya became a daywalker because of her affinity for light magic. Either way, while she’s practicing her flying, I should laugh at...I mean, review my Skills. Let’s look at what we’ve got.
Inori Takafuji / Demon (Vampire — Baron-Class) / Lv. 14
HP: 3782/3782 / MP: 22037/22037
STR: 4133 / VIT: 3661 / DEX: 3417
AGI: 4325 / INT: 5975
Unique Skills: [Growth Boost] [5x Exp Multiplier] [½ Required Exp] [Eye of True Sight] [Eye of Sigils] [Contempt for the Sun God] [Vampirism]
[Baron-Class Authority] [Skill Pilfer] [True Dark Magic] [Armament Craft] [Detect] [Level Up] [Skill Acquisition] [Monarch Caliber] [Martial Arts Master]