The three demonic fiends stood frozen for a few seconds before the giant-like fiend let out a loud, reverberating sound. Although William couldn't understand the meaning of its words, he could easily comprehend the emotion behind them.
In a sense, it was recognition, a single shred of sympathy that the fiends were able to offer, before continuing with their objective, as well as an order to the two other fiends to hold off for a moment.
The brief moments of silence the fiends gave him told William more than the words said in the same time frame could have. With this short interaction coming to a close, he calmly looked up towards the midnight sky, watching the dark raindrops dart towards him like a torrent of abyss, illuminated solely by the full moon far in the background.
Slowly, the two fiends on either side of William began to move in, intending to finish him off for good. On the left, a lizard demon, clad in sharp black scales and claws, on the right, a boar demon wielding a giant battleax.
As soon as he sensed their movements, William began to tread backwards slowly whilst speaking.
"Hmm. It seems even demons are susceptible to empathy. Is that sad?" He said with a blank expression.
The fiends looked towards William in confusion and anger, before yelling in agony as an iridescent spear of moonlight shot through them both with a colorful array of silver and white.
A soft meowing sound resounded in the rainy air as Xiao Wei appeared in front of William, looking a bit more unusual than she normally did.
Her fur was glowing an ethereal silver, her eyes were pitch black, with two constantly shifting moon phases serving as her platinum irises, and her body had enlarged significantly, growing to around the size of a full-grown tiger. Each of her movements reflected the grand moon's image onto the unfortunate passerby, becoming a silent, unnoticed beacon of the night.
She moved gracefully around the area in a circle, as if drawing a guiding line for the nearby spirits to follow. She carved this line out of glowing moonlight, almost like it was chalk.
The two fiends who were struck by Xiao Wei's attack painfully clutched their wounds, scraggling across the muddy ground and shining rain that reflected Xiao Wei's image directly into their eyes.
They let out foul, wretching sounds that William understood as a form of cursing. He quickly raised his bident and aimed at the Lizard Fiend to his left. Only for his path to be blocked by the sudden intrusion of a colossal claymore.
Clang!
Seeing the Giant's grin, William's eyes turned sharp.
[The Record: The Odyssey, Chaos Edition has been brought to reality.]
As a wave of warmth emanated from William's body, a unique notification appeared for the second time.
[??? Is watching your battle with slight interest.]
'Slight interest, huh? I gotta work on my people pleasing skills.'
As that notification appeared and the sun's aura exuded from William's body and began to assault the Shadows with holy radiance, the three fiends looked upon him with newfound anger.
The Giant grunted in pain, "The Sun's manifestations…How annoying." They said, before lifting their claymore and charging at William.
William quickly waved his hands smoothly, ordering Xiao Wei to move in and intercept the attack by creating sharp crescent-shaped, solidified constructs of moonlight that shot towards the Giant Claymore with expert precision.
Meow!
Each of the moonblades swiftly soared towards the giant claymore, colliding within the same instant and causing a resounding clang to echo across the nearby landscape. They drilled into the claymore with such ferocious force that it even pushed the giant back a few meters.
Simultaneously to when this happened, William took the opportunity to stab the already wounded lizard fiend in the head, piercing directly into their soul and brain, which would ordinarily cause someone to die on the spot at their level. However, something strange happened in its place.
Squelch.
The lizard fiend fell limp and lifeless after being stabbed, pitifully crumpling to the ground and bleeding out thick crimson liquid. It spoke wearily at its end. "My…..people…'
Before a strange wispy black substance, sort of like a tangible smoke of sorts, began to surround its body in a circular array, which encompassed its dying corpse, and began to seemingly suck some sort of "wisp" out of it, forcing it through the array, before disappearing.
'What the..'
William quickly came up with a hypothesis. 'Uh….A type of resurrection for demon-kind? It looks like their souls get recycled in some way.'
Grawrl!
The shadow of a massive battleax loomed over William suddenly, as the boar fiend stepped up to the challenge.
It snorted aloud with arrogance, as the wound previously delivered by Xiao Wei began to patch itself up with haste. Given their unique physiology as shadow-born demons, they possessed the ability to merge with shadows to heal; in a way, it could be considered an enhanced aspect of the Lord of Shadows' ability, if only for one use.
"Ahh, now that's a cool ability…I wish I had a regeneration factor that good… William mumbled to himself in avarice. However, he did wonder about the potential drawbacks of such a fruitful power, and why the lizard fiend hadn't used it. Perhaps it was just too captivated by William to think straight.
The boar fiend began moving in, bringing his battleax back, before slamming it down towards William with enormous strength, using his own immense body mass to enhance the force behind his strike further. Not fearing loss, William readied his bident in anticipation.
Crash!
The force of the impact between the bident and the battleax caused the much lighter William to be sent flying backwards, tumbling into the nearby greenery and getting dirt all over his clothes.
'My clothes…Laundry's gonna be a nightmare.' William sighed in annoyance.
Meanwhile, Xiao Wei had been single-handedly fending off the giant fiend, manifesting large aerial moonlight claws to swipe and dice at the fiend and its claymore, dealing moderate damage to both while utilizing her innate agility and speed to avoid most of its attacks. It was a risky battle for both, given that with Xiao Wei's constitution as a partial shadow creature, the potential damage dealt by another shadow creature could be lethal.
Her intuition warned her to take this far in advance, so she decided to play it safer and adopt a more defensive stance, only moving in to attack when the giant's errors created a clear opening.
William, understanding this, now had a pretty good idea of Xiao Wei's gameplan and began to hatch a plan of his own.