The world grew very quiet, and suddenly he couldn't account for anything that she was saying. He tried to speak, but he couldn't hear himself either.

  Something had happened to his hearing, and by the shock in her eyes, she had expected it.

  Ludere wouldn't give her the satisfaction of his surprise.

  He stepped up, knocking her unpinned arm away with his own. His palm contacted her skin.

  That was enough for him.

  He initiated the protocol he had worked on with Gia. He could feel her pain. He knew it wasn't his arm that had a spear through it.

  It was far worse.

  Lueder could feel both his uninjured arm as well as hers. For a surreal moment, he was looking at himself from her eyes.

  Then she wrenched control of herself before slumping to the ground.

  She was out cold now.

  He felt the familiar ping of a skill improving. He would check that when he felt safe.

  He ran her neck through with his spear. It was clean.

  So, he could kill a succubi. Behind him, he could see Gia looking shocked. Before today he would have seemed so much milder mannered. Today? He was the one holding back the tide. All he wanted to do was to get the skill.

  He checked the area. Could he afford to check his skills?

  He couldn't hear anything. The group of demons that had poured through had slowed to a crawl after he'd done the unthinkable and left a pile of corpses.

  It was a shame that the pile was starting to look like a wall. With a shove, he pushed several demons off the pile. There was a clear pathway to him now, and if only they would follow their base instincts, he could continue to rack up skill levels on their Dinarii.

  "Always make the other poor bastard pay for his bets," he whispered to himself as twenty demons and two succubi charged down the street towards him. If he was going to go through this, he would do everything he could to learn from each demon. Even if the learning was just improving one of his skills.

  "I just… I don't know if any vision is the real thing, and it's getting to me you know?"

  The bird was sitting next to him on top of the arena. His last little bit ended because a hulking demon had finally arrived, and decided that it was going to deal with the person that had been killing so many of its underlings. Much to Ludere's displeasure, this wasn't exactly the best thing for his life. Ending it, he decided he might take a loop off. Because, looking at his stats, he had finally gotten Soul Magic to level two.

  That new level hadn't gotten him much more than it had before, but it made it so that he could start the loop with it. This in itself was the biggest boon he could think of. He was now immune to the effects of the succubus. In a larger sense, the problem of how to deal with succubus was going to be a societal one. He couldn't fix them, but if each normal human was able to be just subdued easily by a succubus, then things would be very difficult in society.

  He already thought about how the economy worked, with people selling skill gems based off of class hierarchies and the rare jobs like Soul Magic itself, being harder to find, thus being saved for the military or governance. Even priests would get an option to use such a skill if they had a chance.

  Normal, everyday men like him?

  There was no chance they would be able to get it. And even then, they wouldn't get the training to use it, which was another problem. And when they think of the training to use Soul Magic, then they were literally dead in the water, and this demon invasion was just going to crater the capital. That was probably the intent of the invasion. And he was frankly disturbed by how much intelligence had to have gone behind the invasion itself. The Legion was out on something important, and yet, the rank and file of the demons did not seem that intelligent. They hadn't really shown anything besides the will to just charge headfirst into wherever he was.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Ludere appreciated a good fight. He didn't have a lot of that in him before, but now, with his Athletics skill as well as his Spear Proficiency, fighting came as easy to him as climbing up the outside of the arena, to get a look from a bird's eye view.

  "It's so good to meet you, mister pigeon. You know, I don't have that many friends that I just meet like this, casually off a building? It's good to know that there are some solid, feathered friends."

  Mister pigeon, of course, paid him no attention.

  In that moment, he admired the pigeon for all that it had that he didn't. The patience to sit up there and wait hours and hours was something he wished he could have. Really, he just wished he could have the hours to wait around.

  It looked more and more like he would have to get past this, in order to experience more than this one hour of his life over and over again.

  He hadn't even told Gia or Erebus this time. He just decided to take a loop where he saw what the demons did in the absence of his intervention. Each time they changed tactics, it was in response to something he had done. Either they were learning from him, or they were not.

  He was determined to figure out the reason for any change. Even if it meant some people might die, he needed to understand why they were choosing different things in different loops.

  His normal intervention was to kill demons as soon as he could. This obviously would cause them to understand that there were even humans able to kill them.

  Not every human could say that they can kill a demon. Even fewer could say they could kill a succubus.

  Few still would even attempt what he wanted to do, which was to take out a hulking demon.

  Those demonic leaders were the bane of his existence, if he didn't account for the succubi. Each time when one latched on to him and figured out that he needed to die, he died. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And most of the time, they landed upon him, and that was it, not to clash against them, and those were not even the good times.

  What he needed was a way to test his strength against one of them. What the gods had unfortunately given him was a lot of times to try and fail against them. He just needed to figure out how best to test his limits, so that he might actually come away defeating one of them.

  "So, what I think's going to happen, Mister Pigeon, is that they're going to fan out and start getting into formation as soon as they leave. That's my cue to see what the succubi are doing. I never really have taken the time to inspect them personally. I've only ever seen the leader post up next to the door. Come to think of it, I've only ever seen two post up, and the rest seem to disappear shortly after everything begins. I wonder if that's a sign?"

  Mr. Pigeon was unfortunately at a loss on the topic. It was understandable, as he didn't look like he was a student of demonology.

  "How do I even get to study demonology? Am I going to be making notes for people to study from? Because I don't think that I'm going to be doing too good at that. I think that I can only do so well, and the people that take my notes are going to have to figure out what my scribbles actually mean."

  Mister Pigeon flapped his wings, potentially disdainful of Ludere at that very moment.

  "It's not like I can jump down from here. I don't have that ability yet. No, I don't think I'm going to be getting wings anytime soon. You think I should?"

  Mister pigeon picked through his feathers.

  "I am not doing a swan dive into the arena. I don't care what you think. Apologies, but I have some semblance of self-respect. Yeah, no. What do you want? Birdseed?"

  For the first time, Mister Pigeon gave Ludere an intense look.

  "Where would I even get birdseed? Oh, they've finally noticed us. Alright, prepare for this. We've got this, you and me. I think we make a good team. Watch this!"

  Ludere briefly floated in midair. It had taken several tries to get his Will Magic to work the way he wanted, but he was able to use it to leave the ground. Technically he was only hovering a foot off the ground, but still, it was actual flight. It wasn’t as impressive as the flaming balls of Will that Senator Celisar threw in his fight before succumbing, but it was getting there.

  Mister Pigeon was finally giving him the respect he needed. Of course, it had only taken half an hour of talking to get him to this point. This combined, with a succubi climbing up to his level gave him the excuse to show off. He let his magic dissipate.

  She came over the side. He could see the pain in her eyes. Something about climbing put her off the whole experience. He couldn’t blame that at all.

  Being in the nosebleed seats was a recipe for not being able to make a good wager. He’d often gone up there to think. The area around him had taken no time to clear out. Every single person there did not want to die for a dumb reason. They were there to celebrate the festival of Emrys, not fight demons.

  He would do both.

  "Thanks for coming to my party. You should know that I’m only looking for the best succubi. Also, if you have any battle plans that you want to reveal, I’ll take those now."

  The best he got was a toothy smile from her. She ran straight at him.

  "Perfect."

  In most cases, he had to wait for his opponent to drop their guard. In this one small instance, the demon had decided that she was not playing around.

  Unfortunately for her, neither was he.

  All her effort was placed squarely into a frontal assault. From experience, he knew that there was only so much that demons' admittedly hard skin could do.

  As he slid his spear into her throat with a well-placed jab, for the first time he saw an emotion that was new to him.

  Surprise flashed across her face as he deftly stepped back, suppressing a notification.

  Success when fighting demons was never guaranteed. He kicked her off, she deciding to take the long way down the arena through row after row of seating made for the common man.

  The demon stopped most of the way down near a group of fighting humans, clearly dead.

  “Oh, you see, Mister Pigeon? Now they’re paying attention. Good on them! I wouldn’t want them to miss out on today’s entertainment.”

  A squad of demon foot-soldiers broke off, and were clearly heading for him. “Here come my adoring fans. Time to give them what they clearly want."