The fourteen Khaazim did the same as the first; the moment they entered my lightning domain, they rushed towards me, their massive bodies transforming into a blur.
It was a good thing that my heart was no longer beating fast because I nearly squealed like a girl. Having one mountain charge at you was scary; having fourteen do the same could shatter the soul.
Their movements caused earthquakes all around my lightning domain, and I could barely keep my footing. I knew then that if my body had not been changed, I would have been broken by just the shaking ground.
Despite the pandemonium, I directed the lightning arcs towards their faces, hoping to blind them as they were charging, and I called up Lightning Cascade while stacking as much Surge as I could alongside it.
This combination had aided me in killing a lot of demons, and with my new Anima powering this spell, the Cascade branched, creating a massive tree of lightning in front of me that spread across all the charging Khaazim.
A shockwave blasted from my body, and I realized that this was due to using Surge and not lightning, and it made a loud clap in the air that made the tattered remnants of my bloody robe flutter around me.
The spell did not kill them. They were too far apart and too armoured for that. But it found the gaps between their running plates, and it hurt them, the discharge worming into the joints where the chitin breathed, and two of them stumbled, legs locking mid-stride, shaking their formation and giving me the opportunity I needed.
I diverted four arcs from my Lightning Domain into the first stumbler, focusing it on the head of the Khaazim. It gave a short roar as its head lit up from within, before it exploded, and its massive body fully collapsed to the ground.
The second that had stumbled had already gotten its legs back, moving to the side for the others to charge, and my Storm Sense made me feel the tail that was coming at me from the side before it struck. Observation refining that warning, and I did the thing I had not known I could do until that exact second.
I flickered.
Lightning Incarnate. In the old body, it was five seconds, and then if I was very lucky, a mild channel burn before I could use it again, and I had spent it that morning killing the Sorcerer, and by every rule I knew, it should have been a dead skill until my channel healed, which would have taken months, or I died to refresh my body.
In essence, Lightning Incarnate was supposed to be a one-hit weapon. Expensive and damaging, but I could kill almost anything in front of me with the five seconds of invincibility that it gave me.
But the rules had been written for a body that no longer existed. The new channels did not burn; in fact, I think they liked it. My body became lightning for a moment and returned, and I was feeling a bit more energized.
I did not become lightning for five seconds. I became lightning for half of one, a blink, just long enough not to be standing where the tail came down.
The barb cratered the ash where I had been, and I reassembled two metres left of it, still half-buzzing, the world snapping back into its small, narrow box, and I drove four arcs point-blank into the Khaazim’s open flank while it was still committed to a strike that had missed.
In half a second, the lightning bored into its midsection, and it exploded into two places, its insides frying inside my lightning domain.
’What the...’ I gasped with the thrill of lightning running through me, ’Can I do that as much as I want?’
[Lightning Incarnate 1 → 9 (Initiate) — Broken-Celestial]
[Channel-burn recovery: negated — Celestial substrate]
By all the lights in heaven. I could blink.
∞
I will not pretend the rest of what happened was clean. The Khaazim did not panic, even though I had just killed three of them so quickly; they did not make the mistakes that had kept me alive against lesser things. They freaking worked me.
They came in twos, never closer, the tails leading, each pair forcing me to turn so the next pair had my back. I flickered between them, short hops, half-seconds, my new body finally doing what I meant instead of what I was used to, and I learned to bleed an arc into a flank on every reassembly of my body, killing the Khaazim one by one.
However, for every Khaazim I brought down, I paid in skin. Their speed and reaction were no joke, and I had to be constantly calculating every blink I made so I was not torn into pieces in the next several seconds.
This was now the rhythm of the battle... seconds.
I thought I had dodged it, but the very edge of a massive claw opened my shoulder to the bone. Mortal Shell kept the arm, and that was when I saw my blood was no longer red but bright silver, as if I had metal running in my veins.
Well, fuck me.
The Khaazim that cut me flinched; it was as if my blood was poison, and this elite demon recoiled from it, before another drove it forward, where I made it pay for the flinch with four large lightning arcs to the face that had its name written all over it.
Then I tried something stupid, which in hindsight is how I learn most things inside this loop.
There was a Khaazim I could not reach, hanging at the field’s edge, directing, I was sure of it now, one of them always hung back, and the others moved around its stillness like a hand around a thumb.
I figured out that this Khaazim was gathering all the information about me, so that the hundreds of its kind coming from behind would know everything about how I battle.
Sneaky bastard, I wanted to kill it, but it kept its distance, and arcs at that range only annoyed it, and I had no time to chase.
My Anima was stronger than ever. I wondered what it would do to my other underutilized disciplines.
So I threw Threadwork at its legs, after I blinked as close to it as I could.
Threadwork is not a killing spell. Threadwork at my rank is barely a spell at all, a lattice, a binding, one of the first things they teach you and the last thing anyone respects.
This spell was powerful in another continent, in the right Academy that focused on understanding the mysteries of this magical field, but I had practiced it because I was good at it, and it reminded me of home.
I did not know what to expect when I sent it out through my staff.