The Adepts left a little after I told them to, taking four wargons to leave the camp, all pulled by Fenara’s magic.
"Nearest station is the relay post at Hold’s End," Torvin said. He still wouldn’t fully meet my eyes. "Two days if the wheels hold. We report from there, and they’ll send riders to the Academy."
I nodded, hoping that the Conclave had not destroyed that realy post, nevertheless, I just wanted them gone from this place, since I could not be assured of their safety, and I no longer wanted to watch my friends and teachers die, if I could easily prevent it.
And so, they went. The wagons climbed the basin lip and dropped down the far side toward the long grass, and I stood in the wreck of the camp and watched the dust of them until it was nothing, and then I was alone with the pyramid that was drinking the light of the rising sun.
∞
I had something close to three hours, and I did not waste them. I planted the staff in the dirt at my feet and leaned against it, while I closed my eyes and began to fill myself up.
Folks who haven’t had channels like mine won’t know the feeling, and I’m not sure I can hand it across. It would be like describing what an elephant looks like to the blind, but I will try.
Each transformed channel can hold a measure of Anima, although they cannot hold as much as my Anima Depth. I should be able to pour over two percent of my total Anima into each transformed channel.
I drew from my Depth, and I walked the Anima out along channel after channel, packing it in, sealing it, moving to the next. It is slow work, and the opposite of the spell-casting people imagine when they imagine a mage; however, I enjoyed it, because this was something new, and I doubt any mage except me would have the chance of experiencing something like this.
I did not fill all of them. I had time and patience, but the Depth could not regenerate as fast as I could fill up my channels, and even before it happened, I thought I heard the sigh of a woman on the breeze that blew past me, and my eyes flew open, three hours had gone by, and I think I had just heard the last sound of the Jade Oracle.
The end did not take long, and I felt the ground rumble beneath me; it was as if an ocean of blood was passing beneath me. I felt an incredible amount of essence pouring into the pyramid, and its warning blared into the sky, a moment before the heavens began to turn red.
"Warning. Seventh Seal Loosened. The Pale Matron stirs."
For much of the loop, I had been hearing this warning as a foghorn that settled into the depths of my soul, but now that I knew the meaning of it, I understood that it was telling me that the harvest had begun.
A number of very evil mages were at the moment draining the seals of the celestial essence that bound the Pale Matron into the earth, and as much as I wanted to enter the pyramid and kill them all, I needed to complete my body first... to follow the plan to completion.
The ground rumbled as it began to split apart, and even after I had seen this happen a lot of times, it still made a small part of me shudder, and it was not that I was really afraid, I just saw the promise of the devastation that was to come if this was not stopped.
.
The demons came up out of the dark, and I pulled the staff out of the dirt, stood, and went to meet them.
∞
I want to be careful about how I tell this part, because it is easy to make slaughter sound grand, and even though my magic could be a grand spectacle, my focus was to do a thorough job.
There were two things of concern at the moment, and my title still remained the same, Demon Slayer, and I glanced at the requirements.
[Fourth Earth Gate — 0 / 100,000]
Then at my channels, [ Cor Telluris — Channels: 1,450 / 10,008 ]
The plan was simple: as I strived to complete Cor Telluris, I should open all seven of my gates. Opening all seven gates should comfortably push me to the peak of the Arcanist Tier, or maybe even a Sovereign.
The Khaaz boil up in numbers that stop being numbers. Six-limbed, iron-dark, the pale tendrils working at the air for the scent of anything warm. Against the camp this morning, they would have been the end of everyone, but I saw them as fuel for my ascension.
I did not attempt to hide my presence, and they began to pour towards me. Watching them come closer for a bit, I opened the Loom.
With my understanding of Threadwork and how this spell had integrated this discipline into my lightning, I began to weave a web of power that stretched out from me in an ever-increasing wave.
I pulled the loaded charge out of a dozen channels at once and spun it into a field of lightning that I laid across the basin floor in front of me, low and wide, a net of woven lightning hung a hand’s breadth above the ground.
I paused for a moment, as I felt the lightning essence in the air pour into my webs, and I stretched out my hands and watched the web widen, tripling its size until it covered the field around me for hundreds of feet, and the first rank of Khaaz ran into it and they came apart into chunks of meat, as the threads sliced through them like hot knife through snow.
You have seen a moth that comes apart against a lamp? Good, that was how hundreds of Khaaz died, a small flare, a smell, gone.
I felt the essence of the demons flow into me, but the warmth that they gave me felt too thin, and glancing at my stored essence, I frowned when I noticed I had gained just seven demon essences, when I had just killed at least three hundred in that first wave alone.
However, I figured out that higher gates demanded far more essence than the number on the screen indicated. I should have expected this to happen, but it did not matter. The last resource I was missing was demons.
The second rank climbed over the cooked first rank and met the web and came apart too, and when I felt the amount of Anima I had used in this spell was almost regenerated in my Depth as fast as it was burned, I began to walk forward, bringing the field along with me.
Behind me, the camp had filled up with the smell of demons that had been alive a moment ago and were now a black grease on the grass.