(Rimuru POV)
After I gave the Orc Lord, Geld, my promise to consume his people's sins for my own, things began to move along even faster than the battle itself had gone.
Firstly, the skill updates. Both of my main skills, Predator and Great Sage, had completely evolved upon consuming the Orc Disaster. First off, Predator and Starved merged into one, granting Predator massively increased stomach capacity, as well as giving me the sub-skills, Test, Receive, and Provide. Test allowed me to manipulate materials in my stomach even more freely than before, imbuing them with certain effects and the like. Basically, it turned my stomach into a sort of completely enclosed space in which I was something of a god. Test wouldn't help me with stupid overpowered things like Veldora's seal, but it basically gave me the ability to imbue effects directly into the structures of materials in a way that I always had trouble doing before. The same way that Risa could. In fact, it'd been stolen straight from Risa's skill with Receive, which could transfer copies of any skills that anyone connected to me with a Soul Corridor had, so long as they weren't stratospherically stronger than me. Provide did the opposite, but I could only use either skill if the 'Receiver' and the skill were compatible.
But with me, that wouldn't be a problem. Because the Great Sage had evolved, too.
Basically, by stealing Risa's skills and integrating them into itself, the Sage was able to evolve itself into a new skill called 'Wise One.'
While Wise One's processing power wasn't too much higher than the Sage's, its flexibility in thinking was apparently a lot higher, and the Thought Acceleration was almost ten times better.
For example, if the Sage didn't have enough information for a calculation, it'd just give up. If Wise One had that issue, it'd move directly into measuring vague probabilities, based on the information it did have. Naturally, if it didn't have any information on the subject, it'd still stop dead, but at least this way, I'd be able to plan for possibilities, even if they ended up being wrong. For example, it could bring up possibilities that I'd never have thought about normally. Still not perfect, so I made sure to take a mental note to not totally depend on the possibilities that Wise One brought up.
The other major improvement on Wise One in comparison to Great Sage was its Sub-Skill: Databank. This was directly stolen from Risa's new Unique Skill: Curiosity. Basically, it automatically downloaded certain notable information, like skills, magic, arts, etc. and allowed me to reference them later in my mindscape, as well as enable or disable their usage at will. In fact, I could use it to record any Art that I'd seen and play it back in my mind, over and over again, mentally simulating myself actually using the Art myself, which would do quite a bit to fix my slow Art learning rate, which'd been bugging me a lot ever since I noticed it.
…
But I didn't have much time to get used to my new skills, because the very next day, there was a meeting at the Lizardman caves, with representatives from each race involved in the 'Orc War.'
On the lizardman's side, we had the chief, his guard, and her assistant. Gabil was currently in a cell somewhere for treason, apparently.
For the treants representative, we had Treyni. Apparently, she'd been battling some sort of clown while the whole Orc Lord thing went down. She'd appeared out of nowhere shortly after I'd dealt with Geld, claiming that she'd caught the 'waves' I was releasing, or something.
The goblins that Gabil had assembled were represented by the chief of the assorted villages, mainly marveling (or cowing in fear) at all of the high-level monsters around them.
Then, the orcs. They were led by the sole surviving orc general, with sixteen chiefs of their tribal federation surrounding them. Their mood was understandably gloomy. They'd basically attacked us, and now that they weren't under the effects of Starved, the ones that hadn't immediately fainted from malnutrition weren't likely to be too far behind. If they were to survive, they needed aid from us… even after everything they'd done. And it wasn't like they had anything to offer in return, that was the whole point of them invading the forest in the first place.
I had no intention of letting the remaining 170,000 orcs starve, though. I'd made Geld a promise, and I intended to keep it.
And then, finally, you had the representatives from my small little village. The powerhouse village that'd ended the whole thing.
'At least Risa's acclimating to her new skill…' I couldn't help but think to myself, looking at the blank-faced, dark-red-haired child beside me.
That was Izzy. Risa's Manas.
Basically, Risa's new Curiosity skill was a straight-up evolution of her Processor, with a bunch of my skills added in, and then all of the skills and abilities she'd picked up from various analyses all compiled into the Databank Sub-Skill.
What it did was create a fairly large stomach, which would then become a testing space where you could basically do anything to whatever was inside it. That included messing with the target's skills and everything, if the thing inside of the stomach had a soul. All of that data would then be recorded. If the tests found something that Risa can somehow reproduce, the way to do so was then added to the Databank for easy parsing later.
Essentially, it allowed her to create and parse skills and arts. Since magic worked under its own rules, though, she couldn't reproduce that nearly as well. Basically, she had the same strengths and weaknesses that I had, just reversed. She had to learn magic by hand, but could easily understand and even create Arts from scratch.
Unfortunately, I still had problems with Arts. I could parse them, but apparently my soul just wasn't the type to master them just off of my 'monster instincts' the same way Risa could. I had too much of a 'base' as a guy who'd grown up on Earth, so I had to work to master an Art.
But another interesting part of her Databank was that it could store any skill or art that she had access to the data of, except for Unique Skills and higher. That meant that she suddenly had access to all of the skills that I'd pulled from Ifrit, like Multilayer Barrier, Black Flame, and Replication.
Which she'd promptly used to download her 'soulmate' (literally, they shared a soul) Izzy, into a Replication, to escape this summit. Since she could instantly share information with Izzy, he was able to act as a stand-in… not that I expected she cared. All she probably wanted to do was test out her new usable skills. As much as I wanted to blame her, I couldn't. I really wanted to do the same thing, but nobody would let me.
Other than Izzy, I had Benimaru, Hakuro, Shion,and Soei with me. Ranga was sleeping in my shadow, too, as per usual.
I was seated on Shion's lap in my slime form, while Izzy was sitting beside her in his human form, a blank look on his face. I did remember Risa once telling me that Izzy'd lost most of his personality when he'd assimilated himself, and seeing him now, I could tell that she wasn't wrong.