Depressed, I pressed my finger into the dirt, leaning against the wall behind Milim's temporary office. Honestly, the fact that I could sense my friend on the other side of the wall was actually worse, because I could sense just how bored she was, and it was making me bored, too.
And I couldn't even contact Althea, Veldora, Ramiris, or Rimuru to alleviate my boredom, because Althea was busy in Dhistav, helping Ira and Iroh with some problem they had cataloguing Clayman's junk, Veldora and Ramiris were on a manga binge, and Big Bro Rimuru would yell at me if he found out that I'd teleported over to Eurazania to spend time with Milim after he'd specifically asked me to babysit Chia, who, despite making friends with the 3/9 tailed fox that we'd liberated from Clayman, kept accidentally blowing things up with her crazy powerful gravity manipulation, which tended to act up whenever she got emotional.
And since she had a more volatile temperament than normal kids due to the fact that she'd been born directly from Veldora's magicules, that happened several times a day.
Sometimes several times an hour. Our High Orc construction workers were very busy as of late, and not just on new projects.
Was I this bad in the past? Noo way.
"Answer-"
I will stuff the core of your skill into a rock and bury it so deep it'll come out the other side of the planet.
"Right." Ever since that skill developed that budding little ego…
Back when it was still Great Sage, Isis had basically just been a search engine. As Wise One, it'd been a search engine that sometimes answered the question before I even asked it, even going so far as to explain whatever I wanted to know.
Useful, even comforting. Like Izzy and Sol had been back then.
But now that we'd both evolved into True Demon Lords, Big Bro Rimuru and I's souls simply worked entirely differently.
Ever since I'd recovered him, Izzy had been completely quiet, running combat simulation after combat simulation, using Horus and Aether to bring Sol's mind out of his sword (which had somehow evolved into something that apparently now registered with the Voice of the World as a monster named Sol now, rather than equipment) and have him join in.
He'd taken his loss to that clown pretty hard. I couldn't really blame him for losing, though. Unless you had a skill that directly counteracted it, that illusion skill was incredibly overpowered.
But Isis? Somehow, it'd evolved into that one friend that's not only really smug, but is also smarter than you and capable of reading your mind when it felt like it. Occasionally, when my thoughts idled in random directions, it'd chime in sarcastically.
Then I'd threaten it with things that I could theoretically do to it with Horus, such as ripping it from Big Bro Rimuru's soul and shoving its core into a rock.
While I could do that, I could only do something that invasive to someone as strong as Rimuru if both he and I really wanted to. And no matter how annoying Isis could be, it was family.
Which was a weird thing to say about a skill, but it was true. Rimuru's soul acclimated to Isis and its previous states almost as quickly as my own soul acclimated to the various evolutions of my Curiosity skill, the essence of which had literally formed the backbone that had originally allowed my ego to develop beyond that of a normal slime in the first place. Those skills were like… the cores of who we were as Demon Lord-level beings.
My finger pushed the newly dug-up (from Milim's massive, city-destroying attack) dirt around as I drew shapes, feeling Milim's sheer boredom behind me.
Lifting my finger, it came away a different shade than usual. Miniscule dirt particles coated the tip of it. Since I wasn't worrying too much about the little details, I hadn't bothered replicating fingernails too closely, otherwise the dirt would've been underneath them, too. It intrigued me.
Mainly because I was bored.
I shifted the color of my fingertip to match the dirt. I could still tell the subtle difference in texture, though, so I expanded my Demon Lord's Haki to cover the tip of my finger as I shifted the color back.
Similarly to how the magicules that made up Veldora's own natural Haki had slightly changed, becoming slightly more dangerous due to his awakening of Set, Rimuru and I's own immediate auras had slightly changed upon our own evolutions. This seemed to be a natural result of our powerful souls somehow 'imprinting' on our internal magical force. Milim, Diablo, and Althea's auras similarly carried hints of their personalities, but the profundity of it seemed to grow in direct conjunction with how powerful the person was.
Rimuru barely noticed it, honestly. His effect on his aura simply made the magicules that composed it easier to direct. Something to do with the subconscious precision that only he could employ 24/7 due to Isis handling it all.
Milim's Haki, meanwhile, was much more complex. When she used it randomly, or simply to show it to me, it was incredibly straightforward. Just simple, pure pressure. But when she really let it loose for a good reason, it'd hone on everyone and everything around it like it was genuinely only designed to do one thing: Kill.
In that state, it'd sparkle with hints of something else, something possibly even deeper, more terrifying than Set.
But my own Haki was slightly different. Unless I forced it normal, Horus's nature would leak into my aura, even when I wasn't technically utilizing the skill.
Isis hated it, because in that state, magicules simply wouldn't act normally. They'd almost act like entirely different particles, at least on a small scale, due to the sheer density.
Normally, the way magicules interacted with reality was dependent on various factors, like the presence of spiritrons, the 'cells' of the soul, as one example. Magicules loved to interact with living things, at least on small scales.
But in the densest parts of my own Haki, those rules didn't apply.
While magicules at the outer, less dense parts of my aura would act normally, when I concentrated it like I was doing now, they not only began to ignore the presence of spiritrons, but also each other. They'd still interact fairly normally with matter, but they'd also interact with each other in the same way, fusing and evolving into something nameless that seemed to mildly resemble the things that I saw sparkling around Milim's aura when she got serious. Whatever this evolved magicule particles were, they bonded rapidly with physical matter, causing most anything they touched to either rapidly mutate abnormally in conjunction with my own desires or thoughts, like they were inside some weird 'Horus' aura, or rapidly degenerate from molecules, to atoms, all the way down to pure energy masses that would vanish in the breeze.