I exhaled, the slight tension in my spine vanishing, even though I already had a plan; nothing could ever compare to the moment you stand before a charging demon that could tear you to pieces in seconds.
The demon was on the ground and not moving, and I had roughly thirty seconds to decide what to do about that.
I knew it was thirty seconds from the single observation I made in the last loop when I used a Surge Spark combination. Thirty seconds of complete collapse before whatever internal system the combined cast had overwhelmed began its recovery attempt.
In previous loops, recovery had always succeeded, and the demon would rise, and I would be empty, and it would kill me.
This loop I was not empty. I had spent the combined cast from full Anima Depth with Concentration, holding both channels steady, and the cost of one deliberate cast was not the cost of ten desperate ones.
I had perhaps seventy percent remaining. My staff was still warm under my fingers from the discharge, the wood of it carrying a faint vibration that had not been there before, the ashwood conducting something residual from the combined Surge-Spark that had passed through it.
That feeling of raw power flowing through my staff gave me a sort of assurance that no amount of planning could ever give me.
I stood over the demon and watched it and waited and counted, ignoring everything around me, trusting that Death Touch would alert me if there was a Demon about to attack, even though I could feel two or three spots of cold brushing past my body.
At twenty-eight seconds, the first sign of recovery appeared, and it was not the tendrils, as I had expected, but the limbs.
Demons had six limbs; the front pair were like sickle blades, the second pair was more pointy, like a spear, and the last was curved, supporting most of the weight of the demon, and I had seen them stand upright on that last pair alone.
A faint tremor in the forward pair of the demon as its body began to reassert control from whatever system had survived the cast drew my attention.
At thirty seconds exactly, it pushed itself upright, all six limbs finding the ground, its narrow head lifting towards me, no, it was not focused on me, instead it seemed to be orienting towards... nothing?
The head of the demon turned left, then right, then left again, like a dog whose nose had been sprayed with chili peppers.
I bent my head to the side in curiosity as I saw that the pale tendrils along its jaw had become blackened where the combined discharge had burned through them.
They were now moving with none of their usual constant small adjustments; instead, the motion was now almost random, as if it was grasping at information that was not there.
The combined cast had not just paralyzed the jaw cluster. It had damaged it.
I had once seen a blind woman try to reach for her cane that was a few feet away from her, taken away by two naughty children, and her motions were like this.
The demon was blind.
Although I did not think it was blind the way a creature with eyes is blind, it had never had eyes.
I know there were other ways to perceive the world besides sight, as an Acolyte with a greater soul than mortals, our senses were much sharper, and even with my eyes closed, I would be able to move around a room without much trouble.
This demon was now blind in the only way it knew how to be, as its sensory world went dark, the targeting sense that Death-Touched had shown me as cold spots on my skin now absent entirely.
How utterly fascinating!
The cold spots were not deprioritized the way they went when a demon retreated; they were simply not present.
Whatever generated the targeting signal in those tendrils was no longer generating it.
[Demonology 9 → 10 (Initiate) Rare]
I watched the demon turn in a slow circle and understood two things simultaneously.
First: this was what a permanent change in the situation required. Not more Sparks, or a stronger lattice, these were spells that would only aid me at the level of Adept.
A combined cast at full depth that crossed the damage threshold in a single hit rather than scattering my attention by trying other spells.
Second: I had seventy percent Anima Depth and a blind demon, and if I did not use this opportunity, then I was a fool.
I raised my staff, and it began to heat up beneath my fingers as the next follow-up cast hit the jaw cluster from three meters and the demon lurched sideways, unable to compensate for a hit it had not sensed coming.
One of the tendrils caught on fire, and I saw that the demon was not paralyzed; the tendrils must be too damaged to produce the flat tone response, but a physical impact staggered the six limbs and drove the narrow body two steps to the left before it caught itself.
Besides, my targets were no longer the tendrils, but the head of the demon itself. I was hoping to fry its brain, since whatever its armored hide was made of, they were far stronger than steel.
It turned toward where the cast had come from, and its movements were slow, its burning tendrils still grasping for a signal they could no longer fully receive.
I had already moved from my previous position, taking two steps to the right to create a new angle. As I was moving, I was already preparing my spell, and I cast it a second time.
The staff grew hotter underneath my palm as another small arc of lightning burst out of it. Even if I knew that my hands were on fire, I would not drop my staff.
"Fwoosh... Zzap!"
The demon lurched again, this time forward, one of the front limbs dragging as the discharge hit something structural in the jaw that had been weakened by the first combined cast.
It caught itself, but the drag remained, the limb compensating without fully recovering. Having multiple limbs was the only thing that kept this demon standing.
Something in the way it moved had changed, as the efficiency was gone, that machine-like quality that had made it so terrifying in early loops... the total absence of hesitation, the clean purposeful momentum, was absent.
It was moving the way something moves when it can no longer fully read the space around it, carefully and filled with uncertainty.
I had never seen a demon uncertain before.
[Marksman 12 → 18 (Initiate)]