I stood in the ruin of the camp, Bari’s blood cooling on my face, and I could not move.
What is wrong with me? Why did I ever think I could handle this?
My hands were buried in the chest cavity of the Khaazim that killed Bari, silver-white lightning still crackling from the wound, and the demon’s black-red blood was mixing with Bari’s on my skin.
Behind me, the screaming continued. The researchers. The porters. The Initiates who had been casting small, desperate spells and were now running, falling, dying without the protection of the Adepts.
Dara was still alive. I could hear her Threadwork snapping, her blades of air slicing through the fog. She was forty metres away, two Khaazim between us, and she was not calling for help. She was not calling for me.
Her casting and abilities were at the peak of the Acolyte level, and for her to live this long meant she had other secrets.
I recalled the moment in the previous loops when I revealed more competency during my casting, and she had looked at me with hatred. Did she mistake me for hiding my abilities and think that I was like her?
Or when she tried to protect me till the end in another loop, dying in front of my eyes under the spell of Commander Rel.
I shook my head like a wet dog; my mind was trying to distract itself, and I could not let it.
I pulled my hands free of the demon’s chest. The lightning guttered and died.
"Get up," I told myself. "Get up, get up, get up."
My legs would not move.
"She trusted you. Bari trusted you. Torvin trusted you. Get up."
The foghorn sounded again. The pyramid pulsed red. The sky was the colour of a bruise, and I forced myself to stand.
A Khaazim came at me from the left. I did not dodge. I did not flicker. I raised my hand, and I remembered how Varis had fought.
This was the first time I had seen Adept fight, and although it did not last for long, I had learned a lot, and I saw many weaknesses in the way I cast my spells.
Of course, at this moment, I was not thinking of this, but Observation, Anima Sensitivity, Storm Sense, all were active, and they gave me an instinctive understanding of magic and fighting in a way that I had not consciously caught up to.
I had been fighting alone, instinctively sensing out lightning from my core, and I had learnt a lot, but the few minutes I had watched the Adepts fight had addressed some of these deficiencies.
The distance between my raised palm and the demon’s chest was twenty metres. I collapsed it.
I had used Surge, my Force Resonance, and a bit of lightning to move faster than my active thoughts could process, not even using Lightning Incarnate.
The demon’s chest was suddenly against my palm, and the lightning that left my hand was a negotiation. I was aware I was using another of my lesser-used Broken-Celestial skills at this moment, too, Abyssal Direction, but my mind was not entirely clear at the moment.
"Stop moving," I told the demon’s blood. "Stop flowing. Be ash."
The demon froze as its heart stopped, its limbs locked, as I vaporized every bit of moisture inside its body. Its massive body shrank by a third, and it resembled a statue made out of stone.
I could hear loud vibrations from my status screen, louder than anything I had ever experienced, but I did not want to check what I had just gained or unlocked.
I pushed the demon aside. It fell like a statue and did not rise.
Forty metres. Two Khaazim between Dara and me.
I turned towards them and began to walk. Any Khaaz Demon that came close to me shrank before they collapsed as every single drop of moisture in their body vanished. Warmth was filling me up, but I did not acknowledge any of it.
I just felt cold.
The first Khaazim saw me coming. It lowered its fortress body, straightened its tail. Burst-speed, ten metres in a blink. I had seen it before. I had been killed by it before.
I flickered. Lightning Incarnate, half a second, and I was not where the tail struck. I was behind the demon, my hand on its back.
I found every moisture in its body, multiple spells inside me were working together, and I persuaded all of it to collapse into ash. The demon’s chitin cracked, and it fell.
The second Khaazim looked at me, and then at the demon that had just collapsed at my touch, and it turned around, trying to flee.
A part of me knew that this Khaazim was not running because it was afraid of me, but because it wanted to update the horde about my capabilities, and that part of me wondered, what would it feel like to kill every demon before this Khaazim was able to report to them?
Would it not be funny to see it running from body to body, trying to find who it would report my presence to?
The time for such a thing to happen was not now, and I collapsed the distance between us, and my hand found its head.
I pressed down, and the demon’s skull cracked. Its legs buckled. It was not crushed by force. It was crushed by grief.
Even though gravity pulled me down to the earth in the next moment, the Khaazim reached the ground faster than me.
I stepped around its body and found Dara standing in a circle of Khaaz corpses. Her Threadwork was wound around her arms, pale blue. Her staff was shattered, and she was bleeding from a dozen wounds, but she was standing.
Everyone else was dead, just the two of us, and somehow, I did not find it surprising.
"Elric?" she asked as if she was not sure it was me, then she smiled. "You’re late."
I paused and assessed her for a moment, "I stopped to kill something,"
She nodded and gestured ahead, "Good. There are more."
She pointed east. The Khaazim were regrouping. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, pouring from the cracks in the earth. Behind them, the red fog was thickening, and in the fog, I saw shapes that were not Khaazim. Taller. Slower. Horned.
The Narghul Sorcerers were coming, and my heart skipped a beat, not for me. Dara must have seen something on my face as she asked,
"How many?"
"Enough," I slowly replied.
She nodded. She did not ask if we would survive. She knew.
"Bari?" she said.
"He’s gone."
Dara’s face did not change. But her hands trembled.