Using my body as a Focus for an Adept Tier Spell hurts like hell, but it worked better than I had expected.
I recalled the first time I had unleashed a powerful lightning spell through my body at Commander Rel, and my entire hand had exploded. Now I was unleashing a spell an order of magnitude much greater than that one, and the lightning ran through my own bones to make it, Lightning Resonance kept it from killing me, but did not pretend it was comfortable.
My flayed hand screamed where the current poured out of it... And that was all, my body had become a weapon.
And a mobile lightning domain in the middle of a demon flood is not a weapon.
It is a path.
In the next second, the demons reached my position, the faster-moving Khaaz hit the field’s edge and died in waves. The arcs found them, the Conductive Leash jumped from body to body, and the essence streamed into me in a flood.
[Stored Essence: 14,800 → 15,200 → 15,600 → 16,000]
The Demon Slayer Title drank greedily, and as the warmth from the dead filled me, the channels in my bones pulsed, and the hollow place behind my new soul pressed once, testing, found nothing to exploit, and withdrew.
I could feel the core in my heart rotating faster, and new channel paths were being transformed. It seemed that this process was aided by the warmth from the demon essence pouring into my body, but it was slowing down; the materials within were running out. It would seem that I needed to kill the Narghul Sorcerer to continue my transformation.
Was there only one Sorcerer here, or would I find others? I hope it was the latter, because I would increase the rate of my growth, and I would not need to die many times just to farm these resources.
I began to walk through the horde of Khaaz, and when the recovery rate for my Anima surpassed my expenditure, I expanded the range of the lightning domain to thirty meters and began to run.
∞
The pyramid was east, and with its size, even a blind man would not miss it, and so I ran east.
The Khaaz broke against me like water against a stone. I did not stop, and I did not slow. As I ran, the field ran with me, and every demon that came within thirty metres of my body died.
[Stored Essence: 16,000 → 16,500 → 17,000]
The slope of the ground began to fall as I got closer to the pyramid, and the ground was thick with both ash and chitin as I burned my way through the horde.
A Khaazim tore through hundreds of Khaaz in front of it to reach my side. It dropped its body low, straightened its tail. I recognized what was about to come, so I blinked, half a second of lightning, and reassembled six metres on, still running, the barb cratering empty ash behind me.
I left it behind and kept running. There were hundreds of them here, and not finding a target to kill was not the problem.
The plan was for my Anima Depth to cross the halfway point before I began to kill the Khaazim, since they required more directed action to bring them down.
However, surrounded by demons, what I wanted was not always what I would receive, and more Khaazim were orienting towards my position.
I had managed to throw off most of them when I ran towards the Pyramid instead of running away, but these things were fast, especially when they were moving in a straight line, and not even the hundreds of Khaaz demons around them could slow down their charge.
The Khaazim came at me in pairs, trying to flank me with their speed. Still, they had been delayed long enough that my Anima Depth had nearly reached the halfway point, and this would have to be enough.
I blinked for half a second and met them before they could complete their turns. My hands were not weapons, but the lightning that cloaked them was. I drove my palm into a Khaazim’s faceplate, and several arcs of lightning followed my palm and drilled into its face, where they caved in its skull.
[Endurance: 49 → 51 (Broken-Celestial)]
The Celestial Marrow was settling deeper inside me. The bones in my arms were conduits, the channel network threading through them like roots through soil, and every motion I was making was carrying the weight of the lightning field behind it.
I did not know I could do this, but it felt right even before I did it... this almost instinctual wielding of lightning as if it was part of myself.
The second Khaazim tried to take my back. I flickered behind it, grabbed the base of its tail, and pulled. The chitin gave way, not from strength alone, but from the lightning that passed from my hand into the joint, superheating the connective tissue until it failed.
The tail came away in a spray of dark fluid, and the Khaazim stumbled, and the field’s arcs found the open wound and finished it.
[Stored Essence: 17,000 → 17,500]
Another came from the left, and I did not even break stride, just bled four arcs into its knee joint to fold it and blinked past the falling mountain of it. Blink, run, blink.
If I had the opportunity to kill a Khaazim, I would take it, but the last thing I wanted was to be surrounded.
The bend in the ground curved upward to a ridge, and this ridge was the location of our camp, but I was sure there was nothing left there for me to see.
I left it behind as I pushed forward, my body tearing a glowing furrow across the plain a mile long, blue-white under a red sky, a beacon visible for miles, a sixteen-year-old comet going the wrong way through an invasion.
And the pyramid grew in my sight; it was not the only thing that was growing.
I crested another ridge closer to the pyramid, and at its southern base was an army that stretched from the base of the pyramid to the horizon.
Tens of thousands, maybe more. Khaaz in packed formations, their tendrils weaving together, their chitin gleaming. Khaazim standing in ranks behind them, hundreds of them, their tails raised like a forest of spears.
And behind them in the distance was a sight that took my breath away, a massive tentacle, white as bone, thrusting out from the earth, longer than a mile.