I was looking at people doing something I could not yet conceive of doing.
These two, who had been on the same expedition I had been on, who may have eaten the same bad porridge, had hidden this power inside them the whole way here, and they had not mentioned that they could implode atmospheres and tear holes in space.
In the academy, mages rarely showed the full reach of their powers, and it was a rare thing to see a mage going all out.
I sat with the awe for the three seconds I could spare it, and then the awe shifted.
Because the Adepts were slowing.
It took my Observation crossing the threshold to register what should have been obvious.
The crystallizing spheres around Varis’s hands were smaller than they had been. Not by much, and not the kind of difference that would matter to someone watching from outside the situation.
But the pile of demon fragments at his feet had the geometric record of his cast scale across the time he had been here, and the most recent fragments were marginally less reduced than the older ones, as the structural compression was less complete.
Fenara’s tears across the air were becoming narrower, and I could imagine that the first ones, in the older sections of the pile, had been wide enough that two demons could pass through them simultaneously.
I watched them for another five seconds and confirmed that they were diminishing.
They were not yet failing, but the curve of their output across the time I had been watching was bending downward, and the curve of demons arriving from the crack was not, and the arithmetic of where those two curves met was not arithmetic I wanted to do because the answer was contained in the fact that there had been more Adepts alive a moment before and now there was only two left.
They were going to die, and I did not think it would come from being overwhelmed by superior force, but from their own magic running down.
Adepts at their rank should have been able to sustain this output for hours... days even. The whole point of being an Adept was that the Anima reserves were deep enough to make sustained casting feasible.
Unlike Acolytes like us, who would need to meditate for hours to regain the Anima that we spent, the soul of an Adept was so strong that it was like a magnet that dragged essence from the world around them and was constantly enriching their soul.
The spells they were using, while very imposing, were not that powerful, and I was watching them fatigue, which should not be possible.
Something was stopping them from regaining the Anima they were spending, and should be reducing the rate at which their channels could refill between casts, draining off the recovery faster than the recovery could replenish.
As if by instinct, my eyes turned towards the inverted pyramid, and the answer came to me.
There was no other source large enough to suppress multiple Adepts simultaneously across this distance, and even though I could not be sure, there did not seem to be anything here that could do this.
As I watched the mages slow down, something occurred to me: where was Scholar Orath?
I searched the visible area twice, through the standing mages and the demon corpses, along the eastern edge of the working area where his instruments had been set up every morning.
The white hair and the leather satchel that I had seen were absent.
He was not dead that I could see. He was simply not there, and I wondered if this was related to the fact that Rex had also been missing these last few loops.
I don’t know why this entered my mind at this point, but I remembered Rex briefly mentioned something in my very first loop that I did not pay attention to.
We had been talking about Scholar Orath and his strange actions with the pyramid when Rex had said
"He found something yesterday... I overheard him and Commander Rel last night. He didn’t say what."
I knew that the Commander seemed to be a part of Rex’s personal guard, and if the scholar had found something, was it possible that Rex went to the Commander to find out the secret, and something had happened between these two that was leading to their disappearance?
This connection seemed to be fragile, but I could not shake the feeling that I was right.
Then I felt something like a finger digging into my head, and it was almost as if I could control my head as it slowly turned to the far side of the pyramid, and I saw... the demon!
It was on the far side of the pyramid at the western edge, and I knew it was wrong before I had identified any specific detail about it.
Have you felt the temperature shifting in a room before you have located the source of the cold?
What I was feeling was even worse, like a wrongness arriving in my body before the mind had time to assess it.
The wrongness reached me across the distance, and my Demon Slayer title registered something it had not registered before, a resonance in the title itself, a recognition without information, the sense that the title was looking at something it knew the name of even though I did not.
It was the strangest thing I have ever felt.
I made my eyes find what my body had already found, and it just stood there, as if it was always part of the scenery.
It stood on two legs, not like the other demons on six legs.
Two legs, two arms, upright, the posture almost human in its architecture, and that almost was the worst part, because the human shape made the wrongness more visible rather than less, and the ragged black robes it was wearing only enhanced this image,
Its knees bent backward, the joint reversing where a human joint would hinge forward, the legs absorbing the weight of the upright body in a way that made each small shift of balance look inverted, like watching a reflection in water move slightly wrong.
Two arms hung at its sides, longer than human arms, the hands at the ends of them carrying fingers that were too numerous and too thin.
Its skin was red like blood, and there were two horns rising from its skull in two smooth curves that reminded me immediately of a goat.