Going room by room, he was given a brief summary of the harmful effects of mana, and how each user fought. He filed each description away, so he may be ready in the future to challenge these people.

He found that the users of each affinity came in two types: general or specific.

Some users would utilize the overarching affinity themselves, while others would use the derivative affinities more.

For example, Dei was a generalist Wrath user. He took advantage of Rules a bit, and Rage a bit, but didn't lean too far into either.

He also discovered what each fighter would look like, depending on which way they leaned.

He already knew what a Wrath user looked like, himself, and he'd seen a Rage user, Edward, but it was now that he saw those that enjoyed Rules a lot.

People who used Rules regularly were very organized. They structured their days to the same routine, and any attempts at breaking them from such a routine would result in them immediately lashing out. They did the exact same thing, every single day, with no outside stimulation. Dei asked many questions about this, and found that even when they engaged in "fun" activities, such as playing video games, they'd do the same thing repeatedly, meaning that the person would continuously start over their own save files to do the same thing over.

It was sickening to watch, their minds somehow unable to comprehend variety.

Next were Greed users. These weren't particularly harmful in containment because it was hard to gain a large amount of stuff, but they built power and exerted control over anything they claimed. An overwhelmed Greed user was unreasonably avaricious about everything in their life, laying claim to things which they had no right to, such as public parks or high scores in arcades. If construction happened at "their" park? They filed hundreds of complaints, no matter if the change was good or not. If someone threatened their high score? They'd pitch a massive fit and scream at the person until they were too uncomfortable to try again

The Greed affinity's derivatives were Material and Organization. Material users were the hoarders, laying atop their trash piles like a dragon to its gold. They built power based on how much value their "total amount of stuff" had to them. Meaning it could all be garbage, but if they saw it as priceless, it was hard to pry them from it.

Organization users focused far more on quality. These people were meticulous managers, keeping everything in line. The decorations in their rooms were perfectly measured and everything was crystal clean. Matthew told Dei that when one somehow managed to be in charge of companies or other large groups of people, they became problems. An Organization user running an organization? They were inhumane in the treatment of those below them.

Then came the Envy users. They were the lackeys. They would never reach the top of the food chain, but they would be a powerful second in command, always looking up to and resenting the person of their choosing. When overwhelmed with Envy mana, they would become little more than a vessel for insecurity and instructions. They did everything their chosen person told them, and hate that person all the way, all in the hopes they'd one day be as good as their betters. The two derivative affinities of Envy were Follower and Learning.

Follower users were simple thugs, no desire to reach above their station but always thinking they deserved more. Learning users were actually much more well-rounded, though still unhealthy when overwhelmed. They improved very quickly, but never felt they were ready to become the masters. They held a person on a pedestal, and marked their every move as perfection- transcribing that person's every moment in their mind so they could be the person. Sometimes… literally, going as far as to steal their identities.

Lust users were- in a word- terrifying. Dei remembered from his last world that Lust, when combined with Soul, became the Mind affinity. Anything combined with Soul became something called a controller affinity- affinities dedicated to magical manipulation of a particular concept.

Clever had a controller affinity- Time. Patience was to control the waiting within yourself, Time was to control the waiting of others. In a similar vein, if the Mind affinity was to take control of the logic of others, the Lust affinity was the control of the logic within oneself.

When someone was overwhelmed with the Lust affinity, a stranglehold was placed on their own actions to better manipulate others. Things such as "Guilt" or "dignity" went away, instead replaced with the goal of having others more dependent on them.

Lust users gained power when living creatures were heavily dependent on them. The more dependent, the more the Lust user could read into their minds and change themselves to better fit the person's ideal.

Lust's derivatives were Social and Discipline. Social was based on the more outward approaches, reading others and reacting to them in real time, while Discipline was to temper your own willpower.

Sloth was a weird affinity. Its users were meant to wait aimlessly. They specifically had to be aimless, because to wait for a purpose were Patience users. If they had a goal in mind, it was Patience. If they had no goal, it was Sloth.

Sloth users took everything as it came, and were generally laid back. They grew in power not just by doing nothing over a long period of time, but doing nothing while still maintaining a high efficiency. They were lazy, but they had to actually make something of their lives, such as getting a high paying job where you did nothing but sit around all day. Their bursts of power came when they were finally forced to either act or lose their way of life. They'd become unnaturally good at whatever they needed, depending on how long they did nothing. It was like procrastinating until the last moment then getting a burst of amazing work in, except magical.

Overwhelmed Sloth users were actual functioning members of society, but they'd gone bland. They did nothing outside of maintain their own survival. No fun, no friends, they only ate for nutritional value. Life became dreary, and they fell into depression.

Which was also coincidentally one of its two derivatives: Grief. The other derivative being, believe it or not, Snap

'Oh that's crazy! My avium parents have related affinities! My dad is Sloth and my mom is Snap!'

Grief users were unhappy, but had the unique quality in that they almost always vanquished themselves. The affinity would manifest their mental scars, the things that'd made them fall into a depression, into physical monsters to fight.

It was horrific in a way, but apparently every Grief user would prefer these battles to the ones in their minds. They would kill their trauma, in a literal sense, as the Grief affinity put the beast before them. When looking into these people's souls he found something odd… their Potential, the bismuth rock in their soul?

It had grown.

Grief users had a higher potential than many of those around them, though he was starting to notice that all of the Elite had a natural Potential that was higher than it should be.

Matthew was a bit cagey about this phenomena, so Dei wasn't sure why this was the case, but Grief users could kill their trauma and turn it into a heightened cap on their power. When they were out of trauma… they'd revert to a general Sloth user, and be mentally healthier. If they won.

Many of the cases in these cells were people that'd lost their battle to Grief, falling into apathy instead and ignoring the physical battles their affinities were trying to give them.

Snap mana though, was something he knew about and had fought with before, so his data collection on these people yielded very little extra evidence.

Pride users, on the other hand, were familiar yet unknown to him; the only Pride user he'd ever personally seen was the Alpha Lorpee, and its behavior made a bit more sense to him now.

These users, of course, believed they were above all others. That they were the best, that they were always at the top. The thing with them, though, was that they were usually correct. Pride users were obsessive about their own perfection, and they always compared themselves to the results of others.

When they were recognized as the best in their chosen field, their magic kicked in to grant them further strength, cementing the position even more. The better recognized they were as being "the best," the more they became.

That's why the Alpha Lorpee had charged him on its own. It was a Pride user, and it was putting on a show. If it called for backup right away, its pack would've seen it as weak, and it would've lost strength. If it killed Dei though, an undefeatable giant? The bonuses it would've gained were incomparable to anything else.

Pride's two derivative affinities, as he was seeing now that all fourteen of the Virtue/Vice affinities had exactly two, were Enhancement and Leader.

Enhancement focused on raising one's limit through any means necessary. Of course, any affinity could make someone stronger, and Grief was known for raising someone's potential, but Enhancement was a "General Niche Finder." If you were incredibly good at one thing, the Enhancement part of pride would make you the BEST at that one thing, while Grief would have an all-around improvement. By "General Niche Finder" though, it meant that Enhancement could work for any known hyper-specific thing. It was very broad, but its applications were specific.

Leader put aside the personal improvement aspects, taking someone's underlings and raising them up along with them. A Leader was only as strong as their most powerful disciple in whatever that disciple chose to learn. Leader affinity users focused on helping a wide variety of people, so they could become the best at a wide variety of things- though they were not any better at one thing than everyone. Under the right circumstances, they were a master of all trades.

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Overwhelmed Pride users set unrealistic goals for themselves, then promptly fell short. The failures on their minds would cripple them as insecurity filled their minds, the Pride affinity whispering to them that they were not good enough and may as well die. These users became aggressively suicidal, and were often restrained in their cells.

Gluttony users were probably the most suppressed in this world and were the one user that was not used in the military.

For good reason.

There was only a single Gluttony user in this facility, and Matthew explained why. Gluttony users would devour and absorb the power of magical creatures, becoming stronger and gaining powers depending on how much magically charged treasures, meat, or plants they managed to consume. The issue? Sapient creatures were, for whatever reason, treated slightly differently than magical monsters in the grand scheme of things.

This meant that, on Earth, only humans had any magic in their bodies, monsters simply not existing so… Gluttony users would be compelled to eat people to build their power.

Meaning that the single Gluttony user kept here that was overwhelmed? Yea, he was part of an incredibly small group of Gluttony users that were cleared to put their abilities into action.

He was a cannibal. A government-approved cannibal, that ate terrorists.

Dei felt a bit green at the thought and quickly left the room when the man came to, though Matthew insisted he was not an unpleasant person to be around. Aside from the occasional tendency, this Gluttony user was supposedly quite normal.

Dei wouldn't begrudge the man his life. He knew that the affinity one was born with would shape your mind, and he'd even seen some pretty disgusting sights in the wild. He had a much stronger stomach now than he ever did before. But still, cannibalism made him uncomfortable.

Its two derivative affinities, Bulk and Ingest, did not help. Bulk focused on making the most out of very little but high quality meat, not letting any mana escape from the chosen cut. Ingest was more quantity-based, and even capable of generating power from mana-less meat. This meant that, in theory, Gluttony users would not need to be cannibals, but in practice, Earth did not have a way to alter affinities. Sure, they could lean more into the Ingest half of Gluttony, but the Bulk half would always call out to them, the neglected twin.

Without the ability to change one's affinity away from Gluttony entirely, people would eventually fall into Bulk's grasp if they embraced their magic at all. For this reason, the U.S. just decided to go all in with a few people and see what these soldiers could do when really granted backing.

It was a very unfortunate affinity in the context of Earth.

After the Vices came the Virtues, and these were luckily much more abundant, while also being less harmful to the people around them.

There was, of course, his old friend Kindness, and Dei now saw what a Kindness-based fighter could be. Though he had the affinity, he didn't really fight with it.

Someone who "fought" with Kindness would do so on borrowed strength. They were held up by a net of sorts, involving all their connections to others.

If they were hit, they could pass off a small portion of it to several of their friends close by, and in order to actually hit someone, they could utilize the strength of those people as well. It was like his Meditation's ability to strengthen his connection to others and pass off types of damage, but the entire build was around that. A Kindness user relied on the power of friendship, as silly as that sounded.

Someone who was overwhelmed with Kindness mana started to neglect themselves, giving their every belonging away until they had nothing left, or forgetting to eat until someone checked on them. They were needy and in most cases, annoying. They had to virtually be babysat, and it was just upsetting to know he was half Kindness.

Its two derivatives were Web and Vulnerable. The Web affinity was exactly what he assumed it would be, forming connections to other things to get benefits from them, but the Vulnerable affinity was what really drew his interest.

Vulnerable involved purposefully creating weaknesses in yourself to bolster other aspects, like what Slaughterers did except to a lesser degree. All of his Kindness abilities thus far (Call for Help, Good Samaritan, Meaningful) seemed to be much more Web attuned than Vulnerable attuned, but as a person, he'd utilized Vulnerable quite a bit.

While it was not a direct spell, when he allowed Fendrascora into his bloodstream, he'd passively utilized the Vulnerable aspect of Kindness to provide her an opening to either hurt or help him. That's why she was able to move around freely in his Domain of Denial, even when he himself couldn't. He was vulnerable to her, and that was by design.

He imagined, briefly, what he might give up to gain power using the Vulnerable half of his Kindness. Could he do something like fully surrender his mana manipulation, instead gaining the ability to manipulate mana through others? So while he couldn't take control of the mana within him directly, he'd be able to use the Connection spell to use Perumah's control and manipulate his own.

'Yea I can see why I haven't used Vulnerable a lot in my spells. That sounds stupid as shit.'

Still, he would likely not narrow it down to just the Web affinity. Even if he didn't use the spells of Vulnerable, affinities changed a person, and he enjoyed being vulnerable to his friends and family.

More than that, something was going on between Wrath and Kindness where they kept each other in check for some reason, and he didn't want to upset that balance until he understood the consequences.

Faith came next, and he imagined it would be the chosen affinity of paladins, clerics, and the like. Faith users drew strength from strong belief, and most chose a higher power to do that with, but this was not always the case.

If a Faith user one hundred percent believed in some gibberish or if it made sense to them, it would just work.

So if a Faith user thought they were a witch, and casted a hex on someone using a tactic that involved no magic at all? They might actually be correct.

Its two derivative affinities were Madness and Ritual, and he was again surprised to see that he recognized another affinity.

'Though this particular composition sounds dangerous.'

Madness involved a complete disconnect from reality, showcasing a complete, unyielding belief in something only they understand, and rewriting their surroundings to match it. Matthew mentioned that Madness users changed their terrain in real time, pulling others into their little fake worlds and fighting on their own ground. Get close to a Madness user, and you might find yourself fighting on slippery ground in a rainstorm where you were previously in a house. Too bad for you this person has practiced fighting in this exact setting for months.

Ritual users also partially drew strength from belief. If Madness was rapid, freestyle reality alteration, then Ritual was slow and methodical reality alteration. They went through complex processes that took days, weeks, or months to prepare, eventually leading to them doing some impressive stuff.

When a Faith user was overwhelmed, they tended to slip into the Madness side of their affinity. As a result of this, all of the ones Dei encountered tried pulling him into their odd little worlds. As a result of this, he found a unique effect taking place.

Walking into the first Faith users cell, a force attempted to alter the world around him. He was no longer in a cell, but deep in a cave, and the person before him was trapped behind a cave-in. Their pickaxe hammered away at the wall, and if only they could remove the rubble, the light on the other side would allow them to escape.

Matthew said these people were hard to contain, because after they satisfied their own conditions of escaping their trapped worlds, they'd just teleport wherever they wanted, and the government would have to recapture them again.

When he felt this pull, this Faith user trying to enforce their belief on him, it felt like a wave crashing into a rock; they tried insisting that their reality was real, but Dei somehow managed to enforce the simple fact of "I am more real than you will ever be."

Almost immediately, the Faith user's world started to fracture. Dei, for some reason, was simply too real. His existence and his own reality could not be altered.

The illusion dispelled, his new patient dropped like a bag of rocks, unconscious. It was easy enough from that point to lay a hand on his head and drain out all the Faith mana, though Matthew was flabbergasted. He'd watched Dei's very existence tear apart the entire world of Madness this person found themselves in.

"What… did you do?" Matthew asked.

"You know? I'm not sure. They just couldn't affect me," he responded, though he had a slight idea.

If Matthew would allow himself any overt displays of emotion, he would've been sweating bullets after that display.

He worked to confirm his theory on the next few overwhelmed Faith users, and found an answer to why their worlds responded that way.

Their magic wanted to insist that they mattered more than the world around them, that their belief was power in and of itself, and usually they were correct. When it came to Dei though, it was like the universe simply listened to him more. He was indisputably more important than these Faith users, so who were they to tell him his world wasn't real?

This feeling, he found, stemmed from his Rights, which was quite funny for such a forgotten aspect of himself to rear its head now. Since he had so many Achievements and was considered more important to reality, he couldn't be swayed into their worlds.

This made him think that, perhaps, Madness users had found a way to exercise their Rights like a muscle, which could be dangerous if paired with other magics. Working their Rights out enough would let them hurt others more easily and take damage less, simply because they were fundamentally more important. Of course, it was hardly a stopgap measure to genuinely accomplishing feats, as he'd proven, but it was possible.

His study of all the different affinities proved to be quite intriguing, and he wasn't even close to done yet. He still had five more Virtue affinities to go through, and three affinities that were neither Virtues nor Vices.

He couldn't believe that there were only four foreign affinities in the entire facility, but Matthew cleared that up by saying this one was specifically dedicated to people with natural affinities. Apparently, the second facility was where the really weird ones were. The Karma user, and the other three strange affinity users? They were set to be transferred as soon as a cell was ready for them, it just wasn't time yet.

Past that, the third facility was supposedly where the killer affinities were. They were essentially going in order from least dangerous to most dangerous facilities.

At least, if Matthew had been telling the truth. Now that he was watching for it, Dei saw that the man had lied about the third facility.

'I don't think there's a third one at all. That will simply be where they launch their attack, though they are creating their own demise. Once I have all the different affinities to use, I'll be nigh unstoppable.'

That was essentially his plan. Play dumb until he'd gained all the mana he could ever want, then use a facet of Cycle of Sealing- one that'd only been used once- to fight his way out: transforming himself into a Void Beast-like entity, one made solely of concepts. He'd wanted to test it for a very long time, but the situation simply never called for such firepower.

'I simply cannot wait,' he thought with glee.

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