The moment was here again, and I considered my titles.
Acolyte was equipped now, from the practice session, and I knew that the growth in my spells had been aided by this title, since it accelerated my learning, and when I reach the Adept level, this title would grow and evolve as well.
Death-Touched gave me the cold spot targeting awareness that had kept me alive longer than I should, while also enhancing my Marksman skill, but it did not accelerate skill growth or amplify combat.
Demon Slayer amplified my combat against demons and tracked my kills toward whatever the title became at its next evolution, but it did not show me where the demons were.
Three titles. Three different postures for the same hour. Survival, aggression, or learning.
I had two loops relying on Death-Touched to survive. The cold spots had been my warning system when nothing else could tell me where a demon was coming from. Giving them up was uncomfortable.
But I had Arc Lightning now, and Demon Slayer would do more against demons than cold spots would, and if I died this loop, at least I would die having tested what the new spell could actually do. Besides, if this Epic Title could grow by killing demons, then there was no better time than now to use it.
This title was now the most powerful tool in my kit, and it was time I began familiarizing myself with it.
I switched to Demon Slayer; doing so was easy, requiring only a thought.
The change landed in me the way a heavy coat lands on the shoulders, as I felt a sort of weight settle across my soul. I figured that this must be what the resistance to demonic forces that the title carried felt like.
Alongside this weight on my soul was a faint warm pressure across my skin. It felt as if an armor of air had encircled my entire body, and instantly, the feeling of fear, anger, and the wrongness that filled my spirit every time the demons appeared was gone, and my mind was calm again.
It was deeply unsettling. I now realized that I had grown used to the feeling of fear, and the knowledge that I was simply an ant that would be crushed at any moment; however, equipping this title was like I had been shot with a high dosage of adrenaline, and the knowledge that I was the one who slayed demons and not the other way around.
They were going to fear me, and I was going to kill them, and their skulls would pave a path for me to rise.
I shook my head; my eyes were a bit wild. Was this the effect of having an Epic Title? Only common sense stopped me from running into the growing crack and leaping into it.
There was no more fear in my heart; instead, I was filled with a weird tranquility. The demons will come, and I will kill them all.
I planted my feet at twenty meters from where the crack would open and raised my staff and let Arc Lightning hum in the channel, waiting to be cast, and I thought: the demon that killed me the first time does not know what I am holding. It is about to find out.
The ground cracked, east to west, four meters ahead, with the tearing sound of the world breaking its own rules. I did not bother looking around me; at this point, all my focus was on killing demons.
"Lub Dubdub... LubDubdub..."
My heartbeat was slow and steady, and my fingers tightened around my staff as the first demon cleared the lip of the crack with the unhesitating efficiency it always had, six limbs finding the ground, the narrow head orienting, the pale tendrils along its jaw beginning their constant motion as it listened to the world, searching for prey.
It met lightning.
My first cast was Arc Lightning without using Surge; it was a pure single-discipline discharge at the Acolyte tier, because I needed to see what the evolved spell could do on its own before I started reaching for combinations.
The arc left the staff as a pale blue-white path that traveled the distance between me and the demon in less than a heartbeat, and I directed it with my Concentration and Staff Resonance as it traveled, guiding it to the jaw cluster from an angle that approached the tendrils from above rather than head-on.
It struck with a crackle and pop, and the tendrils of the demon did not darken the way they had under combined casts of Surge-Spark... they burned.
The pale structures caught fire, which burned so hot that I could see the air around the demon’s head wavering. The flames spread along the length of each tendril in the space of half a second, and the demon lurched backward from the sudden failure of its sensory apparatus, the six limbs misfiring as the jaw cluster was consumed by the discharge.
It did not collapse, because I think the demon must be in shock; nevertheless, it did not stop it from screaming.
The high, flat paralysis tone I had learned to expect was absent. What I heard instead was something longer and more raw. I had been killed enough times to know what true pain felt like, and this demon was feeling it.
Its burning tendrils were dripping with pale fluid inside that vaporized in the heat, causing plumes of smoke to rise from its burning face.
Ignoring the screams and the spectacle, I cast again, sending the second Arc Lightning upward from the staff and then pulling it down mid-flight, the arc curving from above the demon’s head and striking the top of the narrow skull rather than the jaw that I had first attacked.
The angle was deliberate. The skull was the structural weakness I had identified in the previous loop. At point-blank range, it had collapsed inward. At a distance, with a pure Arc Lightning cast at the full range the Acolyte tier allowed, I was about to find out what a proper discharge at the same target would produce.
The arc hit the top of the skull, and the skull cracked with a sound that reminded me of an axe chopping into dry wood.