I looked at the massive demons, and they stared at me, and for a brief moment, no one moved, but delaying would only serve the demons better.
Fifteen Khaazim were near me, but I could see more in the distance, tearing themselves out of the earth, and they numbered in the hundreds.
If a Khaaz demon could be equal to an Acolyte, then a Khaazim must be at the Adept Grade, even though they did not appear to wield magic, but I would be foolish to consider them to be equal to warriors that I know.
Not even a fully developed Adept would see the monstrosity heading towards them, and not despair. My only response was to cast Lightning Dominion, and... this is embarrassing, I made the mistake immediately.
I aimed for the fifteen-metre sphere I had thrown a thousand times, and my new Anima gave me forty, and the color of the lightning that radiated from the field was no longer blue; it was also mixed with white.
The radius of the spell blew past everything I knew, the field going up like a second sky, and I lurched inside my own spell like a man leaning on a door that turned out to be open.
I had no doubt that this spell could be seen for miles, and underneath this red sky, it was like a beacon.
The world around me became saturated with power, and it almost felt as if I was about to float off the ground.
Oh, it was my hair that was rising above my head; it was a good thing that I kept it fairly short.
LubDubdub
The sound of my new heart seemed to be resonating with the electrical field around me, causing it to move as if it was breathing, and I could immediately feel a connection to this field that was unlike before... it was as if I was soul casting.
[Lightning Dominion 61 → 62 (Adept-Epic)]
Normally, I switched off my notifications during battle, but this one had slipped through, perhaps in my excitement, and I pushed it aside.
My new Anima had the potency of my previous soul cast spells!
The Khaazim moving towards me did not care that there was a visible field of lightning in front of its face. The nearest one pushed forward, and as it touched the edge of the field with one massive leg, twelve directed arcs snapped to it, and they hit the great chitin plates. The plates glowed red, then white, and the Khaazim took them without flinching and kept walking, smoking, into my field.
I did not doubt that I was frying this creature; its armor plate alone must be nearing two thousand degrees, but its Endurance and Vitality must be ridiculous, and who knows what sort of demonic organs it had under its shell.
"Oh," I said, out loud, to nobody. "You’re going to be difficult."
The lead Khaazim answered by moving faster than anything that size had any right to.
From the time I detected them to when the first Khaazim entered my lightning domain, the Khaazim had been walking. When you consider their size and weight, which I estimated could be between 35 tonnes and 45 tonnes, then there was no reason something like that had any business with being fast... but it did anyway.
It came out of the walk and into a charge between one heartbeat and the next, and in that mere blink of an eye, it had crossed ten freaking meters.
The only sign I had for this impossible burst of speed was that the Khaazim lowered its fortress-like body to the ground and its tail straightened behind it, before it sort of vanished.
Bloody hell, every time these things had been walking, it was just to lure their prey into a false sense of comfort. This damned speed is what they actually have, and they use it when they have decided your guard is down.
If my lightning domain had been its previous size, then I would have been crushed to pieces before I could even react, but forty meters inside my field, where my Storm Sense was ten times sharper than usual, gave me an advantage that I took.
I took control of the arcs striking the charging demon, and I stacked them, four of the twelve onto a single plate of the charging demon, all at once, same spot, near the center of its chest, where I thought its heart would be.
The plate that shrugged one arc could not argue with four. The chitin failed, turning to ash when it became almost too white to look at directly, and the voltage found the hot line beneath.
There was a massive explosion of light as the Khaazim came apart from the inside in a crack I felt in my back teeth, the charge dying mid-stride and ploughing a furrow through the ash with its own dead weight, while arcs of lightning leaped out of its broken body like snakes, snapping around for any conductive body to bury itself.
I did not move, only tilted my head to the side as one of its claws blasted past me.
The other fourteen watched it die, and they adjusted. They had not followed the first Khaazim into my lightning domain as they seemed to be testing my power, and if I thought what I had shown them would make them retreat, I was so wrong.
They all pushed into my domain at the same time, but they were not close to each other. This told me two things. These bastards were smart, did not fear death, and they had read the abilities of my spell and were making moves to avoid its bite.
What made my lighting spell dangerous was not the fact that I could take out one demon, but the resultant lightning that leaped out of the fallen demon to seek out the next... this branching capability of my spells was the reason why I could kill on a large scale, beyond what any Acolyte ever could.
Fine. I had more than one spell.