This core would not dissolve across the body. It would remain in the heart, dense and concentrated, and its geometric binding would radiate outward in controlled pulses.
Each pulse would convert a small volume of tissue into the new channel architecture. Each pulse would be more efficient than the last, because the core would learn from each pulse.
And across loops, the core would grow. Each kill of the Narghul Sorcerer would provide new materials, new crystals, new cubes, and new flame essence, and each loop, I would feed those materials into the core.
The core would become denser, the pulses would become stronger, and the transformation would accelerate.
Until, eventually, the core would be dense enough to convert the entire body in a single loop. Thousands of channels, creating a body that could carry lightning from the highest heights of heaven and shoulder the weight of mountains and seas.
A shell that exceeded all meaning.
This action was not exactly forbidden, but there was no precedent like this before, and no one was here to give me a directive to stop, and I could not kill demons with a substandard weapon when I could create a more effective one.
The Hollow Avatar had no word for this strategy. It was not tactical; the closest word was evolutionary.
This endless loop was a crucible, and I was learning to feed it.
∞
The body was dying, and I had only sixty seconds left to me, perhaps less. My lungs were barely moving, and my heart’s rhythm was irregular.
Mortal Shell’s binding was fraying at the edges, the architecture that had held the body together across the battle now coming undone.
The core pulsed once. Golden warmth flickered through the chest, and a single new channel began to grow from the heart’s surface.
It was a random channel, but already it was now a better channel than Elric’s seven primary channels.
The channel grew three centimetres before the body’s structural failure forced the core to withdraw.
It would not complete this loop. But the channel’s imprint would carry over. The core would remember the geometry, and in the next loop, the channel would grow faster.
The Hollow Avatar’s framework did not register satisfaction. It registered progress, and this was the sort of progress that had never been recorded before.
I turned my body toward the pyramid.
The Caelith Mourne was still pulsing, the red light breathing across its black face, and the storm clouds above were growing.
The eruption had not stopped, and a storm was brewing that would sweep across the entire world.
The Conclave of Ysmar, I doubted they knew what they were unleashing when they activated Caelith Mourne.
This world was too weak for this level of power.
The Khaaz were still emerging from the cracks, fewer now, scattered, the Narghul Sorcerer’s soul-death scream had killed tens of thousands of them, but more would be coming, from their number, a Khazarahn was here... A Swarm Queen.
I began to walk towards the Caelith. The body’s legs did not cooperate fully, as the cracked femurs ground against each other with each step.
The fractured pelvis shifted, and the right lung was filling with fluid, causing my breathing to be shallow and insufficient. But the body moved.
The Hollow Avatar had been given one instruction: Fight until there is nothing left to fight with... There was still something left.
I would not reach it. The body would fail before I crossed the thousand metres of charred earth and demon corpses between the bowl and the pyramid’s eastern face. But the direction mattered. The intent mattered.
The loop would remember that I had turned toward the pyramid, not away from it. That I had walked toward the source of the nightmare, not retreated from it.
The body walked.
Forty metres. Fifty. The left leg dragged. The Khaazim claw had fully reverted now; my left hand was a hand again, though the fingers were blackened and the nails gone.
Sixty metres. The core pulsed again. The new channel grew another centimetre. The transformation was accelerating, even as the body died. The core was learning.
Seventy metres. The body’s vision was narrowing, the peripheral field darkening as the brain’s oxygen supply dropped below the threshold for full sensory processing. The red sky was still visible, though. The pyramid’s black face was still visible.
Eighty metres. Ninety. A hundred.
The body fell.
My legs gave out simultaneously, the left femur finally snapping through the remaining connection, the right knee folding as the ligaments gave way. I went down on the charred earth, face-first, my chin striking a fragment of chitin that had been part of a Khaaz’s skull. The impact cracked a tooth, but the pain did not register.
The Hollow Avatar’s framework was dimming as the connection between the hollow place and the body’s motor functions was degrading. The instruction was still present, but there was no longer enough body to execute it.
I lay on the ground, face down, and watched the pyramid pulse through the dirt, the chitin fragments, and the dark fluid that had pooled across the bowl’s floor.
The loop would turn soon. I could feel it, the engine the size of a continent, the slow rotation of time folding back on itself, the weight of the reset pressing against the edges of my consciousness.
But before the loop turned, the Hollow Avatar’s framework registered one final observation.
The Narghul Sorcerer had been young. Its Abyssal heritage had been only partially unlocked. Its tactical mistakes, the split attention between casting and directing the shadow construct, the delayed reaction to the lightning-state’s speed, the failure to anticipate the claw’s grip strength, all of these were the errors of inexperience.
And yet it had nearly killed me.
If the same demon returned in the next loop, and it would, the loop reset everything except my memory, my soul, and now my body’s new architecture; it would remember nothing of this engagement.
But I would know.
The Narghul Sorcerer would be my primary prey now. Not the Khaaz swarms, not the chitin demons, not the Adepts or the Conclave or the Ascension Ritual. The horned demon itself. I would kill it again. And again. And again.
Each death would yield its crystal, its shadow construct, its flame essence. Each death would feed the core. Each death would accelerate the transformation.
Until, eventually, the core would be dense enough to convert the entire body in a single loop. Until the new channels would spread through every muscle, every bone, every organ. Until the shell of antiquity would become something the Stone Oracle had never foreseen.
A body that exceeded all meaning.
The Hollow Avatar’s framework had no word for this strategy either. But I did.
Grinding.
The Narghul Sorcerer was not an enemy. It was fuel. A renewable fuel source. The loop would provide it every single morning, and every single morning I would kill it, and every single morning I would take its materials and feed them into the core.
The darkness was coming. The loop was turning.
I closed my eyes, or the body’s eyes closed; I could no longer tell the difference, and I let the darkness take me.
The last thing I heard was the distant sound of the pyramid’s foghorn, the note that had marked the beginning of every eruption across every loop.
It sounded different this time.
It sounded like the first note of a new body.