Opponents after opponents, the duel always taking place on the same, identical bridge, but as time went on, it started bleeding more and more, soon, it had become infused with it.
There was little rest in between each fights, if Nilrem lingered on for too long, the wall behind him would start moving forward and force him to either get crushed to death or proceed with the next fight.
This was easily circumvented by simply making sure the opponent would get stuck and not die, allowing the young mage to rest and properly peel of the hungry mana in his system.
There was no clear sign indicating it, but Nilrem felt like the next one would be the last, a hunch one could say, it was the one hundreth after all, it would seem like a good point to end things.
Despite being in good conditions, Nilrem appeared completely disheveled, his neat dark blue suit was as dark as it could get after being drenched in blood over and over.
He stepped forward into the next room, he had been observing for a while but he hadn't been able to see the opponent standing on the other side like before, another sign that this fight was different from the previous ones.
Nilrem carefully advanced on the bridge, noticing nothing such as a presence or killing intent, it seemed like this room was empty but having already met invisble enemies before, Nilrem expected something of this sort.
Yet, no matter how much he moved around and searched, he found nothing, as he approached the wall on the other end of the bridge, it didn't open but shifted around in a strange manner.
Dozens, hundreds, thousands and even more than that, spheres of all kinds suddenly popped out of the wall.
Each of them was perfectly round and had the exact same size, only their colors and what they contained differed.
'Incredible, if she can use this freely, she would be a mage like no one had ever seen, even more than that' thought Nilrem in awe, many of those spheres were filled with intensely dense pure elemental mana.
It was perfectly pure, with this, even an amateur could use powerful spells or even create actual elements, replicating with perfection actual water or fire, no efforts would be needed at all to do it.
Depending on who you asked, they might call it pure mana or energy.
And there was so many of them, far beyond what Nilrem could comprehend, it was as if every single elements and variations even the most minor were present in their most pristine form, a testament to Gluttony's appetite, being able to form such things must have been part of her abilities, in the years of apparition of the sins, there was no way she could have consumed enough of each of those to manifest these spheres.
Some of these were already rare enough to encounter at all, she even had the species specific elements and variations, it was incredible, an actual wet dream for mages, and it wasn't all, it would have already been amazing on its own but it went even further.
Holy mana and divine mana, all of those, they were there too but that wasn't even the most surprising, apart from mana, there were other ways to manipulate the elements and such.
Mindpower was one of those, a fire mage would be using pyromancy, someone using mindpower instead of mana would be using pyrokinesis, it was less common and mindpower was more commonly used by mages to power their spells in a simple manner.
Gluttony had it as well, pure mindpower and its declinations, if Nilrem wasn't busy checking his surroundings for a surprise attack, he would have already sat down to process everything.
The third way Nilrem knew of to manipulate the elements was the control of preexisting elements but it had no energy so there was nothing to see for it.
Nilrem looked around to check for something else and as expected, life and death force were there too, to think that a living could contain so much death force was beyond shocking.
This amount could kill pretty much anything that was alive and there was such an amount that it could even kill undeads.
'Mmh?' hearing the sound of something falling, Nilrem turned around to a figure about as tall as himself raise up from the ground.
It's arms were nearly as long as it was tall, hairy and haphazardly wrapped in bloody bandages, they bended the wrong way as it put its hands on the ground.
It wore a burlap cloak like Gluttony but its one had a hood obstructing the view on its face.
It's feet seemed animalistic as it walked on its toes as it slowly advanced on all fours toward Nilrem.
It was coming from the other end of the bridge, if it didn't accelerate, it would take a few minutes before getting to Nilrem.
He began preparing by placing magic circles that would go off once it approached, it clearly wasn't too keen on rushing forward and seeing its silhouette, it would probably get absurdly speedy and agile once it got to it.
Nilrem was about to start the hostilities when the whole place rumbled, making both him and the monster look from where it had seemed to come from.
The beast stood on its hind legs as it stared intensely, as if it could see right throught he wall.
Everything rumbled again and then, something seemingly impacted against the outside as the wall bursted, sending blood, flesh, dust and whatever was in those walls everywhere, extinguishing the torches on the wall that blown up.
Half of the room was suddenly drowned in darkness as the sound of crumbling stone and splashing blood overtook everything else.
The beast was fighting with something, having opened up its bodies in multiple places to let place to gargantuan maws that bit powerlessly into the giant that was raising it in the air as if its was a toy.
The stone-like goliath didn't make a sound as its held onto the largest maw that was coming from the creature's thin chest, ripping it in half like a vulgar piece of paper and throwing the two pieces in the same motion without care, the craving one pieces twitched in the air before disappearing into the abyss below.
The mountainous monster jumped back to where it had come from before simply sitting down and seemingly falling asleep.
Nilrem was paralysed by shock for a few moments, the monster had come through like a meteor, butchered the monster as if it was nothing before simply choosing to take a nap rather than come for him.
'What is a sin doing here?'