One...
The world slowed.
Not because time changed, time was constant, the red sky above the basin still held its terrible colour, and the black storm clouds were spinning so slowly that it almost resembled a giant mountain floating in the air.
Time was the same, but I was not. The lightning that had been concentrated in my core and then released through my channels was no longer behaving like lightning. The lightning was behaving like me.
My consciousness now rode the discharge through every burned-out channel simultaneously, and my consciousness perceived at the discharge’s velocity.
This state, more than anything, was what was going to kill me, and if I did not have Mortal Shell and great Endurance, then I would have been dead in a single second.
The Narghul Sorcerer’s both hands were extended at the height of his terminal cast. The configuration I did not recognise had reached approximately seventy percent of its formation, and the gathering force at the palms was visible as a sphere of compressed darkness twenty centimetres in diameter, pulsing with the same red rhythm the Caelith Mourne pyramid produced.
Hmm... It was sharing resonance with Caelith Mourne; this should not be possible unless something had gone terribly wrong inside that place.
I had time to study it. In the lightning state, the demon’s perception was inverted. Where his tactical processing had been faster than the Avatar’s at standard combat speed, my movement through the burned channels was now faster than his perception could resolve.
The demon’s three remaining eyes were tracking my position from before the lightning state began, and they had not yet updated.
Two...
My body moved. The Khaaz demons watching from the bowl’s perimeter would have seen one thing only: a bolt of blue-white light leaving the corpse pile and crossing twenty metres of open ground at a velocity that produced visible distortion in the air between launch and arrival.
The bodies along the trajectory’s path collapsed into ash as the discharge backwash from my lightning-saturated form ignited the chitin in passing. The trail behind me was a corridor of fire and disintegrating corpses that would persist for several seconds after I had cleared the ground.
The Narghul Sorcerer’s eyes were still tracking the corpse pile at my previous location when my body reached him, and I brought the Khaazim claw, which came up and closed on the Narghul Sorcerer’s skull.
There was a brief flash of burning red light, and I realized that the demon had poured a lot of his essence into his Abyssal Shield, and if I had attacked him in my previous state, then I would not have been able to break through it, and would only watch as he completed his spell.
That shield had no response to me traveling at speeds that made the world stand still.
The claw tore through the shield, and its four-jointed grip closed on the demon’s head with the chitin’s tapered point digging into the side of the demon’s face just below the right eye.
I squeezed, and the Narghul Sorcerer’s terminal cast disintegrated.
The compressed darkness at the demon’s palm collapsed inward; the cast had required precise multi-vector control across both hands, and the precision required the demon’s attention.
That attention was now consumed by the chitin claw closing on his skull. The discharge that would have terminated everything within the cast’s range dissipated harmlessly into the air around the demon’s hands.
Three...
I had squeezed to get a good grip on the head, and now I pulled.
The Narghul Sorcerer’s neck was not designed to withstand my solid grip backed by the lightning-state velocity, and his red arterial hide ruptured along the right side of the face where the chitin claw had dug in.
Black-red fluid sprayed outward, and since the blood of demons, especially one that was such a high tier, was less dense than air, most of it rose up like smoke, but enough of it sprayed the corpse pile to my left in a long arc of arterial discharge.
The world was slow enough that I could see all of this in detail.
The droplets that hit the chitin Khaaz corpses produced small flares of red light where the demon’s blood touched the lower-tier substance, the chemistry of the higher-grade fluid reacting with the lower-grade chitin.
I pulled harder, and the tendons stretched, as the lightning state was producing force through every fibre of my body simultaneously, and the force was concentrated through the chitin claw’s grip vector.
Every fiber of my being was working together, aided by Mortal Shell, and if there were any less force in my body, then I would not be able to do what I was doing.
The Narghul Sorcerer’s neck muscles were substantially stronger than human equivalents, structured for combat at demon-tier impact loads, and under my grip, they stretched past their tensile limit and began to fail one by one. The first major tendon snapped with a sound that registered in the audible range as a wet crack. The second followed. The third.
The Narghul Sorcerer began to scream in realisation at what was happening to him. The demon had been operating under the assumption that the engagement would conclude with the terminal cast, and not until his skin and tendons began to snap under my grip that the demon was now understanding that something was very wrong.
"Khaaz vel’tarakh... veshrum... GORUM SHA’THRUL—"
The demonic language was breaking, as the demon’s neck structure was slowly being torn apart. The syllables were emerging incomplete, the meaning arriving in my chest as fragments "Vessel... stop... I am... ROYALT..."
The demon was trying to negotiate; it would have been better if he spoke to a rock, as the Avatar would never stop.
Four...
The vertebrae cracked as the Narghul Sorcerer’s spinal column in the cervical region began to grind against each other as the muscle support failed.
A wet sound emerged from his neck as the fluid surrounding the spinal column began to leak through the torn tendons and the ruptured hide.
The demon’s three remaining eyes were now bulging, pressure forced into the skull as the neck’s blood circulation continued to pump while the structural support failed.
I adjusted thousands of muscles around my body, and I pulled, and that was the final part needed, and the skull separated from the body.