I came up out of the deep, and the surface did not hurt; in fact, it was the opposite. I had never felt better in my entire life.
My mind felt incredibly sharp as well as my senses, which I wished were a bit more dull, as I was smelling a thousand different things at once, and yet I was still able to separate most of them into distinct flavors and patterns.
The laugh that broke out of me was crazy, but if you had felt the pain I had felt the last time I was in my body, then you would forgive me even if I wanted to laugh for the next ten years... don’t worry, I, your rambunctious Lightning Magus, Elric, got you.
My body was whole, covered in blood and ash, and um, it should not have been comfortable lying down here, but something about my body had changed, and I think if I wanted to, I could fall asleep while standing.
The ground was shaking around me, but I stretched like a cat, hearing the clicks of my bones and the weight of my blood rushing through my veins, and I knew what it was like to be reborn.
And no, it was not in any mystical way; it was very much real, I had been reborn, and I had no time to sort out what that would mean for me, mostly because I had felt my soul... and it was full!
A strange analogy, believe me, I know, but I had forgotten what full felt like. The last few loops, I had been operating at a third of myself, at half, at twelve percent, scraping the bottom of a cracked cup.
I reached for my Anima Depth, and its presence slammed into me like a wall of light and endless power. It now had a new shape, but this was the last thing on my mind as I felt the endless potential for creation and destruction pulsing inside my soul.
The Hollow Avatar had called the new Anima given to me by the Earth Gate Creation-Anima, but it had no name for my new Anima Depth, and I think I knew the reason... my soul pulsed with power.
My grade may have been reduced to the beginning of the Acolyte level, but every single strand of Anima inside my core packed a more terrifying weight than anything I had before.
If my previous Anima was compressed three times, then maybe I would be getting something close to this, and with the endless potential I could sense inside my Anima Depth, then my soul recovery may have reached a ridiculous level.
I stood up, and my body rose out of the ash in one motion, and I no longer held the cry inside me.
"AARRRGGGHHH!!!!"
By the lights, I hope I did not sound like a squealing pig, but if I did, then I don’t really much care. I am sure that the demons coming to kill me did not care as well.
This thought caused me to laugh, and I did not stop laughing, not even when the first massive shape of what I now know was a Khaazim came into my sights, the ground shaking under its tread.
∞
There were fifteen of them, and they came over the ridge in a line, and the smaller Khaaz ran around and under their legs like little bugs.
The sheer size difference stumped me. From the Hollow Avatar, I knew of a higher warrior caste of these demons, the Khaazim; hell, my left limb had been modelled after one of them.
Maybe it was that experience that convinced a small part of my mind that the size of the Khaazim was not much bigger than the Khaaz, maybe two times bigger, but oh boy, was I wrong.
I should be afraid, but I was not. The only thing I wanted to do was to kill these fuckers, even though they were like small houses on legs.
The Khaaz are bugs the size of horses with the tactical sense of a thrown rock, and they come at you in a screaming flood. I had killed them in the thousands, but the Khaazim heading towards me... were walking, and somehow that made them even more menacing.
Fifteen of them, spread along the ridgeline at intervals that our Supervisor Adepts at the Academy would have wept over, and each one was a thing the Khaaz could only have dreamed of being.
The lower body was a fortress. overlapping chitin plates riding on legs thick as roof-beams, eight of them, planted and patient, and every time one of those massive legs touched the ground, you could hear the ground shake.
Above the fortress, the thing reared up into something almost upright that was a torso that resembled a person if they had been built by something that hated life and had only ever had one described to it, badly, by a liar.
That sheer hatred that I could feel from the Narghul Sorcerer radiated from the bodies of the Khaazim.
And over each armoured back, a tail. Segmented, longer than the body it grew from, arched high and weeping dark fluid from a barb the size of my forearm, and the tails moved side to side as if they was tasting the air.
Fifteen separate scorpion stings drew slow circles against the red sky while the bodies under them stood dead and still like statues.
Storm Sense gave me their insides. Cold-spots, mostly, the abyssal dead-zones where the lightning-feedback just stopped, but threaded through with hot conductive lines where the chitin gave way to nerve.
A smile touched my face. I had not even fully activated Storm Sense, but my new body and fifteen blueprints showing the weak points were laid out for me like a butcher’s chart.
A new body and soul and new enemies, somewhere out there, a god must be smiling.
I was, I am embarrassed to report, feeling fairly good about my chances.