I read my notifications again and felt all the changes in my body. I was stronger than the last time I lay here, and I let myself feel these changes before I came to my feet. I dusted my Acolyte robes. With the increased control I had over my powers, I had not burned them to ash, but I knew they would not last against the coming battles.
As I was about to open the flap of my tent, I wondered if I should hide the state of my new body, but I pushed the thought aside, knowing that I was in a fight that I could not yet survive, and it did not matter what they thought about me... and so it began.
I want to tell you about ten loops and ten deaths.
You know how the count works by now. The channels stay. The essence stays. Every skill I sharpen against him stays, climbing in its quiet column while my body resets to a sixteen-year-old who has never been hit. So what follows should not be seen as ten failures; rather, I would like to think of it as one long lesson, and every morning I came back faster than I had been, hitting harder than I had hit, with more channels threaded through my flesh and more of the world’s lightning answering when I called.
Vrakth met me whole each time and learned nothing. I met him whole each time and forgot nothing.
That is the whole asymmetry. Hold it in your head, and the ten deaths will make sense.
Vrakth was the teacher, and the demon did not know it. That was the joke I kept for myself.
∞
The first time I met Vrakth, I died inside eleven seconds. A lot of things may appear to have happened, but with the speed at which we were fighting, eleven seconds was a long time, and in this loop, I walked in knowing a bit about his hand.
Sending the camp away was easier this time after I killed Rex, Rel, and Orath. I shattered Orath’s soul again, understanding more of his unique spell and learning a bit more about the eruption from him.
I should have been digging for more information, but I needed to focus on one task first, and that was completing Cor Telluris and opening my Fourth Earth Gate, so everything else had to stay behind until I finished with these.
The butchery and harvest began, and I fed on the two-horned Narghul Sorcerers, and when Vrakth came, I was not deceived by his size, because I knew how fast he could move if he wanted to.
When he flickered, I struck where he would be, not where he was. I had followed the way he had moved in the last loop, and I was correct. My Tribunal-wrapped hand cracked the fused shield over his ribs in the first exchange, and I tore open his skin, making him bleed.
I could see the shock and surprise in his eyes, and then he grinned, and the battle began in earnest. We traded moves like small calamities, and everything around us died.
I blinked, he flowed, the crown opened, the dark flame came up out of the ground. I caught the geyser on the world’s white lightning and forked it past him and burned a long line across his flank. He took my arm off at the elbow with a claw I never saw.
So I climbed the air on Lightning Incarnate, burning through my channels faster than I should have, and I tried to snipe him from a hundred metres up. The world turned silver-white. I saw him below me, a dark speck against the red crater, and I aimed.
He threw the dark flame spear through my chest before I finished rising. I did not even see him move. The dark flame crossed the distance in no time at all, and I felt my heart stop before I hit the ground.
[ Cor Telluris — 2,500 → 2,900 ]
∞
I came back quicker on my feet. Lightning Incarnate had climbed a few points in the dying, and a few points at that rank is the difference between a half-second and a half-second you can use.
I did not try to fly. I stayed on the ground and used the Loom to slow him, weaving threads between his legs, wrapping his arms, trying to tether him to the earth. My channels were faster now, the new growth from the first death had smoothed the pathways, and the threads emerged from my fingers like silver vipers.
Vrakth walked through them. His dark flame burned the threads, but they held for three heartbeats. Three heartbeats were enough for me to land a Tribunal bolt on his chest, and it staggered him, but he defended himself with a cloak of shadow that poured from his crown, and this was the first time I had seen him do this.
My eyes went towards the damn shadow crown, and I became Lightning Incarnate, carrying myself up into the red sky on three quick leaps before I came down, wreathed in raw lightning, a falling star aimed at the halo of darkness behind his head.
I hit it square. The crown buckled inward, and for one whole heartbeat, all six eyes went wide, and the field of demons below us flinched as one.
But the dive had spent me, and he caught me out of the air by the leg the way you catch a thrown stone, and he turned the catch into a throw, breaking me against the crater floor until nothing of me worked.
[ Cor Telluris — 2,900 → 3,350 ]
∞
I learned that his shadow crown was a sensory organ. The dark pulses it emitted gave him a map of everything within a hundred metres. He did not need to see me; he felt me. So I flooded the battlefield with lightning essence, thousands of threads radiating out from my body in all directions, trying to blind his crown with noise.
I went for the crown, as my Loom had grown, alongside my channels. The threads were thinner, faster, and more numerous. They filled the crater like a silver mist, and for the first time, Vrakth hesitated.
My Endurance had ticked up across two deaths, my Mortal Shell with it, and the demon could not tear me apart as easily as he did before. I wrapped the crown with lightning and shrugged the flame off a body that was more lightning than flesh.
I endured exchange after exchange; my focus was on breaking his crown. He hit me a dozen times, and a dozen times the Shell held where it would once have shattered.
When the opening came, I put a golden thread through the seam above his third eye, I pulled, and the crown came apart.
Vrakth screamed in pain, and the dark flame guttered across the whole field as the engine that channelled it broke in his hands. Not wasting the chance, I put a Tribunal bolt through his left knee from behind, and he staggered, as his black blood sprayed into the air.
I almost smiled.
He killed me after that with no magic at all. He reached through my guard and tore my chest open and held my stuttering heart where I could see it before the loop took me.
But I had stood against what the Hollow Avatar considered one of the strongest Arcanists, if not the strongest on this world, for a hundred heartbeats and broken the thing he was proudest of, and I went into the dark knowing the next loop would start from here.
[ Cor Telluris — 3,350 → 3,900 ]
[ Stored Essence — 31,000 → 64,000 ]