Survival Instincts.

For every creature, the instinct to survive allowed them to attain unimaginable strength in times of greatest need.

Most demons recognize the will within their demon blood, the deep rooted desire to seek battle and fight to their heart’s content. Because of this, many demons are combat-oriented battle maniacs.

But if anything, they knew how to unleash their thirst for battle.

Their demon blood boiled with excitement at the prospect of facing powerful opponents.

Most demons knew better than to resist their love for battle, they were true to their instincts.

And there are some demons, like a certain young Tengu demon, that have next to no idea how to use their survival instincts.

But the survival instincts are something that is ingrained within nearly every living creature.

If one did not consciously unleash his survival instincts, then it would be natural for the instincts to take hold of the body when the mind is unconscious.

That is exactly what happened to Ren Karatengu, whose consciousness was currently passed out due to combination of falling and complete drunkenness.

Due to his cowardice and lack of confidence in his abilities, Ren’s survival instincts ended up being sealed within his inner mind.

This resulted in Ren developing a rather bizarre case of split personality, his inner self, Inner Ren.

But now that Ren was passed out, Inner Ren was free to take over.

While his outer personality was always scared, nervous, unfocused, and unconfident, his inner self had none of those traits.

Inner Ren was all that Ren was not, calm, collected, and confident.

The stark contrast between Inner Ren who embodied Ren’s survival instincts and regular Ren was jarring.

While Inner Ren was awake, Ren’s consciousness was fast asleep, which is why his eyes were shut closed and his mouth was busy snoring.

Even if Ren’s body was weak and unable to generate its own mana, that did nothing to deter his mastery over skills requiring willpower and focus.

Funny thing is, skills such as mana control, Absorption, and their derived technique, Demon Lord Mode, can be learned by virtually anyone.

Most demons are born strong and spend no time training due to their natural advantages, but weak demons must learn skills in order to equalize to compensate for their physical lacking.

However, that did not mean they were easy to learn.

In fact, only a select few can achieve mastery over those skills.

The reason for that was simple, in order to master them, the user must have a calm mind, with an unwavering resolve and unbending will.

To take control over mana within the atmosphere required one to have strong willpower. While one may be strong of body, same could not always be said about the mind and spirit.

As such, only someone with strong mental fortitude could properly utilize those skills.

With Inner Ren’s calm and intense focus, entering Demon Lord Mode was not an issue.

For regular Ren, entering Demon Lord Mode was rather difficult, it took somewhat longer than normal and he could not maintain his focus, dodge, and attack at the same time. Overall, his Demon Lord Mode was not complete, and as Master Korgan had once stated, Ren had yet to fully master it.

The reason Master Korgan taught Absorption and Demon Lord Mode to Ren was in order to compensate for Ren’s mana disability and weak body.

With Absorption, rather than the mana within the body, the mana within the atmosphere can be used to a greater effect, but with needing far stronger willpower to control it.

By using the absorbed mana and circulating it within the body, one can enter Demon Lord Mode, which enhanced one’s physical parameters to a level comparable to that of a genuine Demon Lord, though it will be somewhat inferior compared to the real thing.

Not only the body’s power and speed would be enhanced, but the durability and the senses will be temporarily heightened as well.

Key word is temporarily, the length of time one can maintain Demon Lord Mode depends entirely on how long one’s willpower can hold.

A novice will hard time maintaining it for a minute while a master can use for an entire day without stopping.

Usage of Demon Lord Mode placed heavy strain upon stamina and took a heavy toll upon the user’s body and mind.

It was not an easy skill to master, not by a long shot.

As Inner Ren stood before them, the warriors of Bukka clan proceeded to charge at him.

Due to the ridiculously harsh sparring sessions with Master Korgan and Sento Draco, Ren’s body developed the capacity to fight relatively well.

Instead of using his closed eyes, Inner Ren relied on sensing the mana of his opponents in order to navigate.

Demon Lord Mode provided rather extremely acute ability to sense mana within surroundings, allowing Inner Ren to be able to perceive all of his opponents in far greater detail than eye alone could detect.

All of the Bukka clan warriors were at least a head taller than Ren, and far more menacing looking.

Each one was armed but some were rather scantily clad due to the fact that armor tended to slow them down.

Compared to them, the humans in the arena only had wooden weapons to defend themselves with.

To make the matters worse, humans had mana cancelling collars on their necks, preventing them from accessing their magic.

Bukka clan warriors were confident that Inner Ren would be an easy human to take down.

What they did not know was that skill of Absorption and its derivative, Demon Lord Mode were not affected by the mana cancelling collars, since collar could only prevent the user from utilizing the mana generated by his body.

Collar had no effect on mana that was gathered from surroundings.

As such, Ren, who could not even utilize his own mana even under normal circumstances, was not really affected by having a collar on.

Since he never uses his own mana, he was not left weakened like the other humans, who were essentially crippled without their magic.

Three Bukka clan demons were coming towards Inner Ren and the group of humans around him.

One of the Bukka warriors had a sword, with which he proceeded to slash the unfortunate human that tried to plead for his life.

As soon as the human’s head was lopped off, he swung the sword at Inner Ren, who proceeded to nonchalantly dodge the sword by turning his body sideways.

At first, the Bukka warrior thought it was a fluke, and proceeded to attack again, only for Inner Ren to duck and deliver a powerful blow with his elbow to Bukka warrior’s exposed stomach area.

Bukka warrior fell on his knees, with all the air knocked out of him, he started to vomit on the ground.

Apparently, a single blow by Inner Ren in Demon Lord Mode was strong enough to incapacitate him.

One of the humans grabbed Bukka Warrior’s sword and proceeded to behead him when he was down.

As for Inner Ren, he was now faced with two Bukka clan gladiators, one with a spear and the other one with a mace.

The spear wielding demon charged first, spinning the spear so fast that one could not keep up with eyes. Luckily, Inner Ren was not using his eyes in order to perceive his opponent.

No matter how many times the Spear wielder thrust with his spear, Inner Ren would dodge it.

From the outsider’s perspective, it would look like the spear wielder was not being serious in his attacks, but in reality, he was trying his best in order to kill Inner Ren, only for Inner Ren to either duck, jump, flip, dodge, or all of the above.

“Damn you, stay still, you human!” With a confident thrust, spear wielding demon thought that the spear finally connected with Inner Ren’s flesh.

Much to his horror, Inner Ren used his knee in order to break the tip of the spear at the moment it was thrust at him. Now the spear was no more than a harmless stick.

Not waiting for his turn, the mace wielding demon tried to ambush Ren by bringing down his mace on Ren’s head.

Mace wielder was a huge demon with a body almost as wide as two normal demons. He was mostly fat, but his muscles were nothing to scoff at.

But instead of connecting with Inner Ren’s skull, Inner Ren blocked the mace with a single punch.

The punch was strong enough to shatter the mace into countless pieces.

Another aspect of Demon Lord Mode, it makes the user’s body extremely durable and enhances strength to an enormous degree.

Without a wasted moment, Inner Ren proceeded to use the offensive skill that Master Korgan and Sento had drilled into his muscle memory.

The skill’s name was ‘Impact’.

During the countless lessons by his mentors, they have tried to, unsuccessfully, to teach Ren the offensive capabilities of Demon Lord Mode.

Due to Ren’s nature, he relied mostly on defensive and evasive tactics, meaning he was severely lacking in offensive tactics.

Master Korgan and Sento though this was a huge problem.

So, they proceeded to teach him the skill of ‘Impact’.

Absorbed mana is gathered and concentrated in a portion of the body, usually the user’s fist, and is released at the moment of the impact.

As for the way they trained him…they put a gigantic boulder in the middle of the training area and tasked Ren to destroy it by using Impact.

The boulder was tough, since Ren was not familiar with earth magic, he could not easily smash it; Master Korgan knew that for a fact.

And the other types of magic Ren was familiar with, mainly Fire magic, were of absolutely no use against a rock of this size.

A heavily concentrated blade of fire may cut it, but it wouldn’t destroy it in one hit.

But a proper usage of ‘Impact’ will.

Ren had to learn ‘Impact’, by essentially punching the boulder in Demon Lord Mode and controlling the absorbed mana.

So far, he never succeeded, either releasing mana too early or too late, usually followed by an explosion that ended up blowing Ren away instead of the boulder and hurting his hand in the process.

Not a single scratch was on the boulder, while Ren was left with countless bruises.

A failed attempt at learning impact, even for someone in Demon Lord Mode, was essentially being hit by highly pressurized mana, in a sense, a mini air bomb that launches you away in a painful fashion.

Ren ended up crashing through several trees while trying to Master ‘Impact’.

The only reason he was not blown up into pieces by failed attempts at using the Impact was due to Demon Lord Mode, which enhanced his durability.

What Ren did not know that Inner Ren, his survival instincts, had managed to master this skill, while Ren himself could not yet do so.

With a single punch to the mace wielding demon’s gut, Inner Ren used the ‘Impact’.

The results were devastating.

Mace wielding demon’s body essentially exploded from the inside at the point of impact.

His head was cleanly blown off and his body had a huge hole in it.

The former spear wielder was left bewildered at the sight of his comrade who was essentially reduced to pieces of meat.

“Monster!” he proceeded to run for his life.

Seeing something interesting, other Bukka clan warriors now started to gather in Inner Ren’s direction.

One of them was an enormous demon who wielded an over-sized sword that was about as long as a normal person.

Inner Ren proceeded to dodge the swing that now left deep cracks in the ground with a single leap, and proceeded to use his Storage Ring.

Bukka clan members truly were foolish for letting Ren keep his Storage Ring, which housed most of Ren’s items.

Among them was a silver sword, acquired during the Second Trial from a human base Ren had accidentally burned to the ground.

Silver was extremely effective on demons, along with Holy type magic, it was one of the most efficient ways to combat demons.

He moved too fast for the enormous demon to even have time to dodge. Pulling out the silver sword, Inner Ren slashed through the enormous demon’s head, splitting his skull horizontally in half.

As the hulking demon’s body fell to the ground, Inner Ren, stood up, with his eyes still closed, but the Bukka clan warriors could tell he was looking in their direction.

Warriors of Bukka clan were filled with fear at the sight of one of their mightiest gladiators being taken out in a single move, but to the humans, this was a spark of hope.

“He is a Holy Knight! We are saved!”

“CHARGE!”

“Destroy the demons!”

Due to Inner Ren using the silver sword, the humans thought he was on their side, and received a huge moral boost.

Somehow, Inner Ren ended up being the one leading the captured humans against the Bukka clan demons.

“Well, well, well. This guy is more fun than I thought” Kanka remarked with a smirk, but his fake skin ended up slipping off, exposing his skeletal jaw.

After fixing the skin to his skull, Kanka muttered.

“He looks like him…and the way he fights is somewhat similar, though I can see some differences…”

Death Hand is mostly offensive fighter, with very little skills in defense, but this Ren guy, he was the opposite; his fighting style was defensive, with only a few offensive skills.

But for some reason, seeing Inner Ren fight, Kanka couldn’t help but think of Death Hand. They were not the same person, Kanka could tell as much, but for some reason, Kanka could sense a connection.

“Who knows? Maybe they are some distant, long-lost relatives or something?” Kanka made a blind guess, but he couldn’t have known just how right he was.