I was aware that I had already lived longer than two of my previous loops, but now I had maybe fifteen percent Anima Depth and a demon behind me that was not dead.
To me, this was a plus, no matter how small it was, I was making progress, and that was all I wanted to be thinking at the moment, anything else and I would collapse into a wretched state of fear and uncertainty.
As I moved towards Dara’s voice, I looked at the camp, and the camp was... gone.
The orderly grid of tents and equipment tables and supply lines that thirty-one people had spent days building had been reduced, in the time it had taken me to knock one demon down, to something I did not have a clean word for.
Multiple tents were flat, canvas torn, and dark with stains I did not look at directly, knowing that these should be remains of bodies. The instrument tables near the east face had been overturned, brass gauges and calibration arrays scattered across the earth, and beside one of them was the body of a researcher whose name I had learned on the second day of the expedition.
Further north, near the supply crates, four more bodies. Porters. One of them was still moving, which was somehow worse than stillness because the woman had been cut in half, and she was leaving a trail of intestines behind her.
I counted the people I could see who were upright, and the number was shocking: seven out of thirty-one.
Commander Rel’s voice was somewhere in the chaos, but I could not fully hear what she was saying, maybe instructions or condemnations, but the sounds did not make much sense to me in my current state.
Death-Touched was active, and like all Titles, despite its effects, there was no strain on my mind or my Anima depths to keep it active.
Since I equipped the Title, it had been showing me targeting points during the fight with the first demon, cold spots on my body marking where death was being aimed, and now, moving through the camp wreckage, it was doing something different.
Not one set of targeting points. Multiple. Scattered cold across my skin from multiple directions simultaneously, each one a demon somewhere in the camp that had registered me as a target and had not yet acted on it.
I counted the cold spots and figured out that there may be six or more demons in the camp that had marked me, and these were six too many.
How many demons were out here, and how could we ever survive?
Ignoring the uncomfortable sensation surrounding me, I moved faster towards my two friends, and I found Bari first.
As I was moving, I was a little bit upset that they had left me when I told them to stand behind me, but then I could imagine that this was the first time this event was happening to them, so I should not be surprised at their reactions.
Bari was on the ground, sitting up, pushing himself upright with one hand while the other gripped his staff across his body in a way that was not a combat stance in a defensive stance, as if he had forgotten that his staff was a tool for projecting magic and not a shield.
Of course, as Acolytes, we could use magic without our staff, but that was a good way to start losing fingers and limbs, as we were not fully capable of channeling the raw forces of creation.
Bari’s field coat was torn at the left shoulder, and there was blood on the right side of his face from a cut above his ear that I am not sure he had not noticed, as he kept blinking one eye that was becoming filled with blood, too panicked to realize he needed to stop the bleeding.
His eyes were moving across the camp with the rapid, unfocused movement of someone processing too much and managing none of it.
"Bari," I said, and his head jerked towards me, and for a moment I was not certain he was seeing me.
"Elric," he called out in a tone of voice that I thought resembled that of a child, the confident and slightly cocky attitude that I knew was entirely gone, "Elric, there are... There are things coming out of the... I saw Aldis, he was just standing there and then... "
"I know," I said. "Where is Dara?"
He looked around for a moment before he pointed east, his hands shaking.
One of the cold spots on my skin flared, the one at my neck, sharpening from background cold to the specific piercing quality that meant a demon had moved from marking to targeting.
I turned and cast Spark at the shape moving through a collapsed tent fabric to my right before I had fully processed what I was looking at.
The discharge hit something, and there was a sound of impact, and whatever was inside the tent fabric lurched and went still for four seconds.
I did not wait to see what it was as I grabbed Bari’s arm and pulled him upright and moved east.
"Walk," I said. "Don’t look back. Walk."
I tried not to think about the fact that the sound of battle was becoming less, and the cold spots I was feeling on my body were increasing.
A status update blinked near my eyes, and I glanced at it and nearly froze.
Auxiliary Skill Gained:
Demonology [Rare] 0 > 6 (Initiate)
What sort of Auxiliary Skill was this? I was dimly aware that in the back of my mind, certain knowledge was beginning to appear as if I had studied it before, but I could not focus on it, as it would mean I would have to stop moving, and so I pushed it aside.
The sound of Bari’s footstep behind me gave me the clarity I needed as his shaky steps and panicked breathing pushed away this new development for later study.
I found Dara twenty meters farther east, backed against an overturned supply crate, her staff held in both hands in front of her, visibly shaking.
There was a demon circling her, smaller than the first demon I had stunned, and it was not attacking her; it was almost as if it was studying her or just keeping her pinned down.