Reborn: Demon Core

With the time winding down before the arrival
of his opponents from the seven swords guild, Ash spent more time
fighting. Emelia didn’t complain as long as Ash spent three nights
with her out of the week.

Ash was a little surprised that Emelia was so
strong headed about their night time, but she was more than
vigorous. Ash had been slightly worried about any child that he
might have since it would carry what the rest of the world
considered tainted blood, but Emelia calmed his fears. It seemed
that one could have a baby blessed before its birth to ensure that
it would be born a full human. This was most often done to women
who had been attacked by a member of another race, but it was an
expensive spell. Not because it was hard or needed an advance level
priest, but because it required the person doing it to be
discrete.

Having never had a relationship before, Ash
felt a little lost when dealing with Emelia. Before when they were
together she would only kiss him or even touch him when they were
completely alone, but now whenever she saw him, she would give him
a light kiss. Ash had thought that little would change once they
were wed, but he had been sorely mistaken.

Other than Emelia and the upcoming battle
with the Seven Swords Guild Ash also had to deal with Yuki and
Allice. The two had become friends and often even Tina came over to
talk with them. While they were friendly whenever Ash was around,
they wouldn’t leave him alone. He was starting to feel like a worn
out toy.

Thankfully Ash had his time in the labyrinth
each day to relax. He found it slightly odd that the only time he
had to relax was while fighting for his life but he tried not to
think too deeply about it.

During the past weeks, Ash’s demon absorption
had reached level 3, allowing him now to receive an ability after
only absorbing thirty monsters. Not only that, he was now able to
absorb all of the boss monsters that he fought. Due to this, each
day Ash would warp to each boss room to fight, but he had yet to
gain an ability from any of the bosses.

Though the bosses had yet to give him an
ability, the light hounds on the twenty-second floor had given him
the shimmer ability.

[Shimmer: cost 10SP- surrounds the body with
light making it hard to discern movement.]

The ability was almost useless against most
monsters, but Ash could see its appeal when he had to fighting
against other humans.

Right now though they were fighting on the
twenty-third floor against ogres. The inside of the labyrinth floor
looked much like the side of a barren mountain. The ogres fought in
groups of two or three most of the time, though it wasn’t that
uncommon to find a lone one. They were eight to ten feet tall with
dark green skin and large boar-like tusks and used crude clubs as
weapons. After they were defeated, they dropped their tusks and
Lillanis and the others were overjoyed by this. It seemed that ogre
tusks were used in high quality strength potions and sold even
better than many of the drops of higher level monsters, but that
was only the case for the good quality ones. If they were average
or below, the price dropped drastically.

“Another good quality tusk,” Halon said with
a large smile. “I never heard of a dungeon that had ogres to fight
before the thirtieth floor.”

“Yea, but even then, the drop rate for tusks
is supposed to be really low compared to most the other monsters,”
Jacob said shaking his head. “I think we should just call Ash the
golden boy for now on. If we keep this up, we will be set for
years.”

“I can finally get me a sword made out of
Elemantis,” Halon said happily.

“You wish,” Jacob replied laughing.
“Elemantis cost a platinum coin an ounce. It would cost at least
forty platinum coins just to buy the metal and just as much to find
a blacksmith that could forge it.”

“Don’t kill my dreams,” Halon said
frowning.

Elemantis was the second hardest metal known
and was sought after. The only thing harder was dragon steel, which
was only given by the very rare steel dragons. A single sword of
dragon steel would cost the same amount as a decent sized countries
gross income for more than a few years.

“Stop playing around, I want to hunt a few
more before we are forced to leave,” Lillanis said. Unlike the
floors before when they had started fighting ogres, she had become
rather ruthless.

“She always gets like this when we stumble on
a good source of money,” Jacob whispered to Ash. “She keeps up with
our money so honestly, neither I nor Halon know how much we have.
We don’t even notice we are broken until Lillanis tells us we’re
permanently camping.”

“Then I can understand,” Ash said with a half
hidden smile. “With the way you two eat and drink, I am surprised
she is able to keep any money put back.”

“That’s a little harsh…But you are probably
right,” Jacob said with a chuckle.

“Let’s go,” Lillanis yelled and the two
jumped and quickly moved to follow.

This time they found a group of three ogres,
two of which were having a head butting contest. Sighing, Ash and
Halon rushed forward. Even though he had a lower level, Ash took on
two of the ogres alone while the other three worked to take down
the one left.

The ogres were ridiculously strong, but also
slow and incredibly stupid. Unlike the higher level monsters, the
ogres didn’t fight Ash because they could sense his strength, but
because they couldn’t tell how strong any of them were. The ogres
just fought whoever or whatever appeared in front of them.

Jumping to the side to dodge one of the
ogres’ strikes, flecks of rocks bounced and hit Ash doing 2 damage
to his HP. Each time he saw the strength of the creature’s attacks,
Ash was amazed. Even with his strength and endurance, one strike
head on would most likely kill him, or at least horribly wounded.
Thankfully the attacks were slow, so even dealing with two ogres
was not that much of a problem. The real challenge was doing any
real damage to the ogres. Even with his high strength, Ash had
trouble breaking through their skin, and unlike Halon and Jacob, he
didn’t have any skills that could easily penetrate the ogre’s
natural skin. He had tried his shadow ship, but even that only
worked against armor and not the ogre’s skin.

Halon used sword bash, a warrior skill that
allowed him to negate 40% of the opponent’s defense while Jacob
used stealth strike which allowed him to ignore 100%. Ash was used
to being the powerhouse of the group, but against the ogres it was
Jacob who shined the brightest.

After the first ogre was taken down, Ash
pulled back while Halon drew the attention of one of the ogres
while he kept the last one busy. Even fighting one on one, Ash was
not able to take the Ogre down before Jacob and Halon took down
theirs, though he had done a lot of damage to the creature. Thanks
to the damage Ash had done, it only took one strike from Jacob to
bring the last ogre down for good.

None of Jacob’s stats were higher than Ash’s.
The only thing that made him stand out was his skills. Seeing how
effective the skills were, Ash started to understand why there were
so many guilds. Ash had taken his reading time with Emelia to read
up about skills and guilds.

There was not many facts about how guilds
started. What did survive was mostly myths and rumors, but Ash was
able to dredge out what he believed to be facts. When the world was
new, was the common wording and even after giving it a lot of
study, all Ash could say was that at least fifteen thousand years
before a war happened. Most the books say that it was between the
humans and demons, but the few books that he found that dealt more
in facts never said demons but instead said creatures born of
nightmares. One might think that demons would be the same thing,
but later on he even found a few stories about a demon hero who had
fought in the war. Once again, most the books said humans, but the
older ones said great races banded together to fight against the
threat, but were found lacking. Preying to the gods, their voices
were heard and the gods blessed the heroes with skills that suited
them. The heroes trained those under them in the same skills. So
that no one hero would get too strong, the gods limited the skills
a single person could learn and thus jobs were created.

If it had been his previous life, Ash would
have laughed at the idea of a god, but after how he was brought to
this world he didn’t find it so farfetched. Though Ash didn’t find
very much useful information about guilds, he did see how much the
world had changed over their years. The older the book was, the
more it talked about the great races, but the newer the book, the
more they pushed human supremacy. It took a very large jump after
the demon wars and while people of the beast tribe fought with the
humans, they lost a great deal of their numbers and soon were
pushed into the back of society.

Ash wanted to read more, but even though
Emelia had a very large collection of books with a number of them
so old that they had rebound a number of times, it was still only
one noble’s personal library. Thankfully, books were not as
expensive as Ash thought they would be. It seemed that paper was
easily made thanks to alchemy and was often one of the first things
they learned to make. Thanks to that, paper was cheap and easy to
acquire. However, books that ran contrary to the government were
often destroyed which mean the older books were rare outside of
personal libraries. Ash quickly began to understand that the
history had been changed over and over so that only the gods truly
knew the truth anymore.

“Tring.”

The welcomed sound came after Ash absorbed
the second ogre.

[You have reached the required absorption
level for the Mountain Ogre. Abilities available; Iron Stomach
(passive), Iron Strike (active).]

“Tring.”

[You have been awarded Iron Stomach
randomly.]

[Iron Stomach: for each ounce of iron you eat
your strength will raise by 1 but at the same time your
intelligence will be reduced by 1.]

“What the hell is that?” Ash asked when he
saw the description of the ability.

“What?” Halon asked, seeing Ash’s
reaction.

“I just got an ability that lets me raise my
strength permanently, but at the cost of my intelligence,” Ash
said, still flabbergasted.

“I don’t know if that is good or not,” Halon
said scratching his head. “Well whatever, better to have it and
never use it then need it and not have it.”

“I guess, hopefully the other one is better,”
Ash replied.

“They have two abilities that you can steal,”
Lillanis said smiling. “That is good, killing a few dozen more will
be good practice.”

“You just want the gold that the guild will
pay for their horns,” Halon whispered under his breath.

“What was that?” Lillanis asked, narrowing
her eyes as she looked at Halon.

“Nothing, I was just commenting on Ash’s new
skill,” Halon quickly replied, a small bead of sweat formed on his
forehead.

“It is already late, don’t you think we
should take a break for the day?” Jacob asked after he picked up
the spoils.

“What are you talking about? We can still get
a few more kills in today,” Lillanis said, ignoring Jacobs’s
suggestion without a second thought.

“She works a poor guy to his bones,” Jacob
said with a sigh as he followed behind Lillanis. “Nothing is as
scary as a person when gold is in their sights.”

The next fight was against two more ogres and
just like before, Ash kept one bust while Lillanis, Halon, and
Jacob fought against the other. The ogres were boring to fight for
Ash. If it was not for their insane strength and defense, he would
find it hard to believe they belonged this deep in the
labyrinth.

Jumping to the side to dodge one of the
ogre’s overhand strikes, Ash jumped forward, striking the ogre on
the knee. It barely scratched its skin and only did fifteen damage.
Not only did his attacks do little damage, the wear on his sword
was heavy if he attacked over and over. With most the day gone and
Ash still have a large amount of his MP and SP remaining, he
decided it was time to start training his abilities.