Trapped with Utha

Suddenly, as if his muscles grew a mind of their own, his arm swung up as he was still taking in all the information and threw the sword aside.

For a fraction of a second, when Zeeths robes fluttered, he could see some transparent and shiny blue thing wrapped around his arm.

Then, enraged by the fact that their owners were threatened, all his slimes shook violently and a hundred blue fists formed from around his body, each taking turns to pummel her.

Soon, he stood back up, rubbing his head and the hands retracted again. Staring at him, she was able to mutter, "wha- how? You're… standing? But… and blue hands!"

And she promptly passed out.

"I go through surprise memories all the time, that was nothing," he told her unconscious body. He walked closer, wanting to look at the circle she carved into her hand. Just as he was about to touch it, the hand jumped a bit. A bead of blood formed on the scar, opening a small wound where the blood rolled out. The skin moved again and more blood came out all around the circle as the hand bubbled and morphed. Her entire hand was soon cut up, the circle tearing itself up and destroying her hand.

"HEEEY!" he yelled down the hall, his voice echoing around.

'Allow me.' Black told him. Magic swirled out from his mouth, stabilizing in front of him. Colors swirled together until a black eyeball was made.

"After synthesizing the dragon's mana, I regained this ability. It really has been too long since I used this skill, it feels good to be free." the magic eye told him. He was able to hear his voice physically instead of in his mind. The eye floated off to where Page was and a few seconds later, a haze flew back into his mouth and Black told him, 'Page knows where we are, he is coming,'

Page and a group of dwarves arrived, including all the rest of the elders, looking around at the mess. A female dwarf laying on the floor with a bloody hand and a bruised face, two guards still on the floor which had a large hole in it, and Zeeth standing there amongst all the mess lit up with his Lumos Gems.

The dwarves gasped, looking at the mess, but Page said, "her hand. Did she have a circle on it?"

"Are you saying she had a contract with a demon?" a dwarf asked one of the five elders they saw in the room sitting on the high chairs. "That's a heavy accusation, how would she even have known it?"

"A demonic contract? What's that, Utha?" another elder asked.

Utha explained, "A demonic contract is something we mortals can make with beings from another side of the world, the afterworld where tortured souls go to rot. The creatures there are very different from us and circles are a way of communication and making contracts. But people who make contracts with them and fail to uphold the terms of the contract get ripped to pieces, not just have the circle destroyed. Why is it just her hand and why does she know it? It doesn't add up, human."

"I don't know, but nothing else would tear up a hand like that. Only a demon's circle will self-destruct when its host breaks the contract. Let's take her in and question her when she wakes up."

Lifting the three unconscious dwarves, the rest left Page and Zeeth alone. Utha looked back and told Zeeth, "we will need to know what happened here, tell us later."

"Zeeth what did happen?" Page asked when they left.

"I came and saw her in the dark, a black lens on her eye, actually, it's this one," Zeeth said, picking up the lens that was on her face, holding it close to his face he said, "it's an old dwarven technology to see in the dark using light tracing magic."

"What?" Page asked, surprised to hear Zeeth say that. He was surprised he knew it as well. Studying the object, he noticed certain parts and bits that he understood the function of.

"I think it was when I was flashed by her."

"... what?"

"She said she was always being bullied so she was going to copy all the dwarf's techniques and kill all the dwarves so she had all dwarven metalwork techniques recorded into one big book and sent all the information to my head expecting me to go crazy with all the new information."

"But you survived because you experienced a ton of that already. But now you have all this new stuff on dwarven metalwork? You should know, they are known to surpass every other race in production skills."

"Yeah, I figured. Why else would all their records be on metalwork?"

"Right, but it still surprises me that you were able to process all this."

"You should be thanking me," a black eyeball said beside them, "I helped sort out all the information as it was coming in to make it easier to process for you. Just like how I sorted out the Dragon Heart drink, you owe your life to me twice."

"Wah! The eye is out of your body!"

"Yeah, he learned to do that just now. What did the potion from the dragon heart even do for me?"

"It helped me clean out your body. The rush of magic collected them in bunches for me to sweep out, but some of it is still being processed. The results will be shown soon, though. When everything is done being processed, we will know."

"You didn't tell me the potion was still being processed."

"You didn't ask. I didn't think it was important."

"But I want to process it myself."

"You are. The first day you drank it, you were breaking it down so fast and getting so used to it that your body remembered what to do whenever it sensed any of the potions left. From your efforts, your body is acting like the first chunk was a vaccine and has learned to do it by itself."

Page looked at it, shocked, "I've never heard of anything doing that before."

"Of course you haven't," said Black, "how much have you heard about the potion?"

"Not much, just possible results and what it looks like."

"Exactly. But I have heard of it, many people who use it tend to sit for days and possibly weeks to process it all as soon as possible, but there were very few people, absolute masters of control, who were able to condition their bodies to do it for them unconsciously. But I think your method was different from theirs, you just have a rather adaptive body to rapidly take in things that you are working hard to practice or use." finishing his talk, he slipped back into his mouth like a magic fog.

"Zeeth, let's walk back. That elder, Utha, doesn't he seem strange to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I guess you don't know, but it isn't exactly common knowledge on how contracts work with Demons, even the other elders didn't know about them. I only knew about them because we began hunting demons in the past life and studied up on them a lot- the hard way. We were even contacted by a few Demons to create contracts, something almost never done before since no demons were able to humans up till recently, so we know a bit of the contract personally too. But how would he know all that? Even I didn't know half of that until we earned our Demon Hunter ranks."

"Demon Hunter?"

"These ranks are given to those who have been cleared to hunt demons in gaps in the world. It's a rank made later, it's really easy to earn. But I'm just saying, he is very suspicious. We should question him later."

"How? They are elders, they wouldn't just let us torture them."

"Were not going to torture them, just ask questions that will reveal things about him to us without him realizing."

"And how will we do that?"

Looking back at him, Page grinned and said, "I am the son of the world's greatest merchant, you know."

"Oh, yeah! I remember seeing you in the forest back just before we met, I didn't know you too well so I was just watching you from afar. How come you don't want to be a merchant, you have all these connections ready, I'm actually surprised no one recognized you here in First Dwarven."

"I didn't come here before, my dad came by himself. Well, you might've seen how reluctant I was to become a merchant, it's mostly because of my grandpa. He wasn't famous, but I think he was the strongest. He told me stories of how he easily struck down dragons and controlled the wildest animals, which enthralled me enough to go the same path as him. But maybe that scared my dad, he knew he couldn't live up to his fathers legacy, so he decided to take another route to become the best in. at least hold some kind of legacy instead of treading in the already walked over the path that he knew he couldn't possibly make more imprints in."

"Was your grandpa that strong?"

"Yeah, I watched him train himself. I even followed him on his journey around the world for a month, he is damn impressive. He is one of the few who could easily take on any of the eight and win, I saw him fight one personally."

"Who?"

"Emperor Robin. Known as the master of sword arts and ruler of the greatest knight's army, he is the strongest of the Eight when it comes to physical skill. And my grandpa beat him using nothing but a common sword just to prove that he could. He isn't the sanest man I know, but he is the strongest."

"Who would win, future me or current him?"

"If you're asking who would win if each of you were at the peak of your strengths, it would be a tough battle, but I think you would win. But right now, we both have a lot of work to do before we can even try to fight him."

Finally, they got to their room, where their beds lay exactly as they left them.

But Zeeth was too full of swimming ideas and too energetic to fall asleep. He had all these thoughts on new dwarven techniques so when a dwarf appeared to ask what was going on, he immediately asked him to bring him to someplace he could try some blacksmithing.

"You have a serious knack for this kinda stuff, human! I wouldn't mind having a son like you, hahaha!" Utha bellowed. He saw them on their way down to the workstation and decided to follow them.

"Oh, thank you."

"Well, why don't you?" Page asked

"Why don't I get a son? What, you want me to kidnap him?" Utha asked, throwing an arm over each of them.

"His wife can't bear children."

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry. I had no clue." Page said apologetically.

"Nah, it's pretty common amongst dwarves, only about half the women are capable of giving birth safely." Utha explained, "In fact, I was quite surprised to hear that all human women were expected to be able to bear children, no wonder you all used to have a population crisis."

Zeeth had been hammering away at a hot red piece of iron to make it into a proper dagger, using discarded metals and old, unfinished works to practice. Understanding how something is done doesn't mean he was a master at making them, he still needed to calibrate his strength and personal methods. Utha and Page were watching him, Page with mild interest and Utha with a mixture of shock and suspicion.

Finishing with the final touches by sharpening it against a massive block of a whetstone, he picked up his completed work, a small iron dagger. It wasn't anything spectacular, he simply added onto someone else's half-finished dagger and completed it but he was proud of how it shone and how smooth he had gotten it from its originally discarded state.

"Where did you say you learned blacksmithing again?" Utha asked.

"My friend's mom knew a lot about it."

"Strange, it looks an awful lot like dwarven techniques."

"Aren't most blacksmithing methods similar at this level?"

"Yes, I guess you are correct. But, I still can't let this go." his voice suddenly turned incredibly cold and menacing, "Did you see the record?"

Page and Zeeth both stared at him, watching for his every movement with their calculating eyes but Zeeth simply asked as innocently as he could, "What?"

"I don't have time for this." he pulled out a red rock and threw it against the entrance that they came from. The rock exploded, breaking the rocks and blocking off their only exit. "Breaking off that red rock will tell the other elders that I, along with the entire village, is in danger and they should be evacuated as soon as possible, to leave the village without looking for me. No one will interrupt us for quite some time. Now, you saw the contents of this record, right?"

He pulled out the record that the female dwarf had, "she whispered to me that you also have her lens. I would like to ask that back and I will resort to force." He rolled up his sleeves to reveal two large metallic workings, metal pipes and wires covering his entire arm. Snapping his wrists forward, metal workings covered his hands as well.

"My personal creation, do not make me test it on you."

He flicked out a small shard of ice with black magic in it and threw the shard at him. He extended his arms to let the shard come straight for his chest, astonishing the two. The shard pierced through his fluttering cloth and was absorbed by a certain blue shield, the shield they saved from the humans. The shard was sent back to them as a mix of snow and a little swirling.

"One of the finest artifacts I have ever seen, you know it uses magic to repair itself? And in this world of diminishing artifacts, it really is a fantastic piece of work."

"Diminishing artifacts?"

"Yes, the number of magical artifacts has been decreasing for some time now for god knows why. Probably some greedy king trying to take all the artifacts for himself."

But from his back two spider-like claws stretched out, striking the two. Page grabbed them without taking a single step and ripped the entire mechanism off, the straps coming off with it and the shield, attached by the same straps. Zeeth punched him hard in the gut and stopped him by locking him down with handcuffs made of greystone.