My eyes brightened, and I pointed at my chest. "I am Elric Voss. I wield lightning, and I kill demons... they go down easy. Let’s see if you’re any different."
I saw the face of the Narghul Sorcerer beginning to change, and then I attacked. In this loop, attacking was almost always the best option.
Lightning Incarnate activated at full transformation, and the world became silver-white in my perception. I crossed the distance between us in less than a heartbeat.
There was something I had always meant to try, but the demons had never forced me to push myself to this extent... While in the midst of Lightning Incarnate, I wrapped my hand in the golden tribunal lightning and closed it around Vrakth’s throat.
Maximum offense, maximum defense, and maximum mobility at the same time. In this state, I was at my peak and had no weaknesses of my flesh.
As my hand closed around the demon’s neck, he did not move, and when I thought victory was near, my hand passed through his neck like it was made of smoke.
I fell out of Lightning Incarnate and looked around me in shock, but I could not see him. What I had grabbed was an afterimage, a trick of light and shadow, and the real Vrakth was... I sensed him a moment before he attacked... already behind me.
I felt his claws tear through the flesh of my back, and his hand closed around my spine before I could react. My body froze in shock and pain at the sudden violation.
"You are fast," he said, his voice calm, almost bored. "But speed is not the same as presence. You move through the world like a lumbering beast of burden."
With these words in my ears, he squeezed, and although the pain that made me almost bite my tongue rippled through me, my spine did not break. Mortal Shell held every piece of me close, and Endurance at the Arcanist level meant that it took a lot to break me... after all, I have been broken a lot, and my body was no longer fragile.
However, I felt the pressure, felt my vertebrae grind against each other, and the channels in my back began to strain.
Gritting my teeth, my body blurred, Lightning Incarnate, half a second, and I was ten metres away, facing him, my hands already weaving the Loom.
Having channels that stored Anima had just rescued me from death. I did not need to cast spells by pulling from my Anima Depth and weaving them through my channels, making it easy to cast spells and use my abilities without much focus.
Threads of lightning shot toward Vrakth from every direction, silver-white and hungry. They wrapped around his arms, his legs, his torso, his throat. This place was filled with lightning essence, and that meant my threads could be made from all of them at a moment’s notice.
Feeling a massive pressure beginning to build against the binding that I made, I pulled, and the threads cut into his skin and stopped. It could not cut any deeper.
My eyes widened when I noticed that his Abyssal Shield was unlike the rest of the Narghul Sorcerers; it was a layer of darkness that clung to his body like a second skin, and the Loom’s threads could not penetrate it.
"Threads," Vrakth said. "You weave threads like a mortal child weaving grass. But I am not grass, Broken Celestial. I am the fire that burns the field."
He raised his hand, and the shadow crown behind his head exploded outward. The wave of darkness hit me mid-transformation like a mountain. I was thrown backward, tumbling across the ground, my threads dissolving, my Loom unraveling. I hit the ground, my lightning form turning the earth to glass, and I skidded, leaving a trench of molten rock behind me.
I pushed myself up. My arms were shaking, and my channels were screaming. The blast from the demon should have killed me, and even though I had quickly transformed myself into lightning, reducing the damage I suffered, all of my mundane channels were destroyed, and I was sure that part of my organs had failed.
Vrakth walked toward me slowly, his six eyes fixed on my face. He was not hurrying, and after what I had just seen him do, there really was no need to.
"Your powers are odd... unbalanced," he said. "I saw you kill so many of the young ones that I thought you would be difficult. I was wrong."
I stood up. My ribs were cracked, and my left arm was numb. But I was not dead, and my transformed channels were stable. Cor Telluris had rebuilt each one from the purest of essences and tribulation lightning... with Mortal Shell giving me a staying power beyond all common sense, the demon would have to hit harder than this to put me down.
Coughing, I spat out a thick wad of silver blood that began to rise into the air. "You talk too much," I said, as I released Lightning Tribunal, and I did not hold back; if the heavens wanted to find me, let them.
Golden light gathered in my chest, bright as the eye that had judged me, bright as the tribulation that had unmade me hundreds of times, and I aimed it at Vrakth’s body and, with a roar that echoed for hundreds of meters, I released the lightning.
The air in front of the golden bolt shrieked, and distance seemed to be nonexistent, and the golden bolt struck the demon in the chest... one of the most powerful features about lightning was always its impossible speed.
His Abyssal shield flared as the golden light and the darkness met in a cataclysmic explosion that sent me flying backward, even though I was nearly a hundred meters away from the demon.
I bounced twice before I rolled to a stop, and I slowly got to my feet, as hot air blew past me as if a storm had been unleashed in front of me. When I looked up, past the devastation that had cleared the earth for hundreds of meters, Vrakth was still standing in the same position.
His chest was blackened, and his skin was cracked. Dark fluid seeped from the wound, but he was not dead... He was not even kneeling.
"That," he said, "was impressive. For a mortal."