After scratching his nose, Mephist realized that there were very few people who both knew him and could talk about him. Either they were all buried underground, or they were very far away. He muttered to himself that only by killing everyone who dared cause trouble as fast as possible could he finally live a peaceful life.
While sighing like that, Belial began tinkering with other interesting things. Thanks to his entire body of Magic being developed in parallel with the System, he could now maintain high speed flight while doing other tasks at the same time. Multitasking no longer placed any real burden on him.
His current method of flight relied on his own gravity as lift, combined with Elemental Fusion Engine as the primary power source. With the help of Gravity Manipulation, even his massive body could accelerate to this level without difficulty. In his estimation, his normal cruising speed already allowed him to casually zip back and forth through Low Earth Orbit.
If he could keep accelerating continuously in the vacuum of space, surpassing three times the speed of light would not be impossible. Even so, after everything he had experienced, Belial felt that he was still too slow. After all, those he would eventually fight almost all had instant movement or teleportation.
Naturally, he could not afford to lag behind. For now, his acceleration method was still brute force output, though he already had a direction for the next generation of engines, which would still rely on Radon's help. By trying to integrate that power into an engine with stronger energy output, a decay based engine, he followed his original upgrade path, but the battle with Edward gave him a new idea.
"Let's keep thinking in reverse," he muttered. "If I can make basic particles move backward, why can't I speed them up instead?" He continued, "Since gravity can warp space, maybe I can use it to shorten the path directly. Ordinary fuel engines are outdated, so why not just try a Warp Drive?"
Once his thinking opened up, the possibilities felt endless. It seemed that he already met almost all the conditions required. Particle Acceleration was something he was very good at, and Gravity Manipulation was even more familiar to him.
He suddenly had a strange idea, to break himself down into Black Mist Form and accelerate in a state with almost no physical properties. If he completely disassembled himself and then reassembled elsewhere, could that count as a different kind of instant movement? The thought made him pause.
"It's a great idea," he said, "but it's better to put it aside for now." Belial thought it over and decided experiments could wait until after he killed his enemies. Coming up with an idea and immediately testing it was not always wise.
After all, he still could not fight properly within phase space. So he decided to create a new project folder and leave it running in the background. Then he reminded himself that he still needed to act like a programmer and hurry up to finish his Friend Slots and Login Port first.
After the previous strange experience, Belial continued flying while modifying his System. The first thing to solve was the network cable problem. Remote login and proxy control were essential to prevent his base from being attacked while he was away.
The problem was that his data flow was too large and easily burned through the cable. This cable, which was the foundation of power transmission, was formed from light and darkness, and worked by using that medium to control parts of his Clone body tissue to turn into black mist. That mist then merged back with his main body to allow login.
At present, there was only one cable, built earlier by someone else, and another one he was constructing himself, which was still under urgent repair. The issue was that he did not know who built the first cable, so he barely knew how to fix it. Connecting to it was not hard, but making it carry his power safely was troublesome.
After more research, Belial discovered that even the previous network was special. It had at least a two way interface, while anything he repaired alone could only be one way, since others lacked the ability to connect through Empathic Communion like he could. Overall, the difficulty was far greater than he had expected, though it was not discouraging. This was only the beginning.
"Friend chat and network cables at least have a starting point," he said. "But building them one by one is way too troublesome. Every extra person means another cable, and I would be fixing this forever." He sighed and added that there had to be a better carrier than a single line.
After thinking for a while, he began to design a new concept. Once again, he turned to reverse thinking. The difficulty lay in one way communication and the heavy cost of building networks, and cables alone were too fragile.
"So why not pull more cables?" he muttered. "If pulling them one by one is hard, why not use a one time solution? For example, linking a large number of lines together into a platform." He envisioned an extra internal System structure, like a relay or chat platform dedicated to communication.
With such a system, communication could move beyond one way messages. Others could leave messages, and he could log in later to check them. If expanded further, users might even communicate with each other, with him acting as the middle operator, and perhaps even outsourcing proxy login tasks.
"It sounds great," he admitted, "but it's still too unrealistic. Moving too fast like this is risky." Even so, he decided these could become major projects in the future.
He suddenly paused and narrowed his eyes, looking toward the ground a few hundred meters away. As mentioned before, after multiple groups had ravaged the area, several Demonkind territories and billions of lives had already been wiped out. Nearby wild monsters were either killed by proximity or had fled, leaving the land unusually quiet.
Yet in the distance, he saw a group of several thousand people. They were not soldiers, but ragged slaves of many races, weak and fleeing toward the border. Behind them rode a group of Demonkind on magical beasts, hunting them like livestock.
They threw harpoon guns loaded with poison and paralytics, impaling slaves and dragging them to the ground. Others used cruel ritual spells meant purely to cause pain, turning magic into thorned whips that lashed the helpless crowd. Screams and moans mixed with arrogant laughter.
These Demonkind had complex backgrounds. Some were deserters who fled when battles turned bad, others were lucky survivors of massive sacrifices whose cause was unknown. All of them had been terrified by constant disasters and now clung together simply to survive.
"Hahahaha!" someone laughed. "This is the best way to kill!" Bado was a powerful Troll who had taken leadership with his fists and axe.
He charged into the crowd with Maniacal Laughter, chopping off dozens of heads amid flying blood. He felt incredibly lucky that out of so many fellow Troll and such a massive battlefield, he alone had survived. Now, fleeing only to find slaves to slaughter felt like a blessing.
"Run faster," he shouted. "Otherwise I'll have the Mage Array behind me kill you all!" He laughed wildly, saying that maybe a few could live if they ran.
He crushed a person's head with his bare hand and looked with interest at a thin brown haired man trembling as he faced him. The man held a broken sword, likely picked up from a nearby battlefield, and pointed it at him. A human daring to threaten a Troll caught his attention.
"Interesting," Bado sneered. "You want to cut me with that broken sword?" He laughed again and smashed several humans into pulp with his axe, then stared at the silent man. "Say your name. It'll make a good joke later. How about it, human?"
The man was called Pierce, as someone in the crowd whispered. A few others who knew him stepped forward with weapons in hand. Pierce said calmly that he was not crazy, and neither were they, because after witnessing a miracle, he intended to live.
Slaves of many races stood there, including Orcs, humans, and even Elves. Pierce and his companions had once been soldiers on the Faris Empire border before being captured and sent deep into Demonkind territory. Because they were still combat capable, they were brutally crippled, with limbs cut off, and most of their comrades died from this alone.
Afterward, they were given no food or water, locked in dungeons without sunlight. They survived on filthy water, grass roots, worms, and rats until people began to die, some at the hands of Demonkind, others by their own. Pierce, though from Faris Empire, believed in Dawn, though not devoutly.
In the dungeon, a few memorized lines of doctrine kept him from going mad. In rare sleep, he and others dreamed of faint light brushing over them, easing their pain, though the future still felt as dark as the dungeon. Then one day, light truly came.
He awoke under the midday sun to find the dungeon and castle gone. His body and limbs were restored, as were those of his companions. All Demonkind had vanished, and surviving slaves of other races were healed as well.