I looked over to the northern edge of the camp where Commander Rel was visible.
She was standing with her staff in her hand, her field coat torn across the shoulder, and her eyes locked on me from a hundred meters away.
The two surviving members of her squad were behind her. The northern line had held because the demons had stopped pressing it, since they were all coming for me.
Rel watched me cast, and I could not read her expression at that distance. But the stillness of her body was its own statement.
I knew a bit about her. She was an Adept who had served in three campaigns, and she must have seen mages do extraordinary things, and yet, here she stood, on the field, while a sixteen-year-old in singed Acolyte robes vented steam from his own breath and unmade demons by the dozen.
Commander Rel was not too close to the Pyramid, and still, she was not as efficient or as powerful as she should be.
So it meant something else was going on here, and it was not necessarily the pyramid that was suppressing the power of the Adept Mages, but something else.
I was slowly coming to a realization that our expedition was not simple, and there may be parties here that knew more than they were letting on.
I did not think I was strong enough to begin asking questions... but I will be.
Looking away from the Commander, I did not slow down my casting speed.
The next cast should not have been possible; it should have collapsed in the channel before it left the staff. Still, it left anyway, and Mortal Shell was paying the difference, as three demons came apart in vapor that mixed with the steam coming off my own breath.
A single cast had passed through the three demons until it buried itself into the earth, leaving a small molten crater.
[Stored Essence: Eighty-Nine Demons]
The breathing in my chest was now visibly steaming. I could see the vapor leaving my mouth in the cold air around the discharge field, and the vapor was not water; I suspected it was blood.
It smelled of ozone and the faint suggestion of me; this was my own essence venting through my breath as I cast from below the threshold.
I was burning.
Mortal Shell was buffering it. But I was burning, and the burn would be permanent if I did not pull back... but I had a count to reach.
[Stored Essence: Ninety-Six Demons]
The number was approaching a hundred. I had not consciously set a hundred as a target, but the number was approaching a hundred, and the title’s evolution was waiting on something, and I was not going to stop until either the title evolved or my Anima ran out or my body broke.
Six more demons came at me from a collapsed wall, and I cast one combined Arc Lightning, and the chain found all six, the bodies came apart, and the count rose.
[Stored Essence: One Hundred and Two Demons]
The number crossed into three digits, and I felt something pulse in the Demon Slayer title, a deeper acknowledgment, as the title registered the milestone in some metric I did not yet have access to, but the gate did not open. The additional condition required line remained.
Perhaps the demons coming at me did not include the one the gate wanted. The chitin demons were not enough to evolve the title past its first gate, and the title may want higher-ranked kills. Larger demons.
Or the demon with the goat horns and the four burning eyes.
That demon would be my bear, and unlike my father and his father, who stood up before the bear and watched it leave, I would not just be standing; I needed to take down the famed bear.
I don’t know when I would be ready for this step, but it would happen... eventually.
The next three demons that emerged from a fissure twenty meters away saw me, and the air around me, which was filled with the vapor of their dead.
Fun fact, do you know that when you vaporize a demon, their remnants do not quickly fall to the ground, it was as if it was many times lighter than air, and now that the sun was coming through the cloud in the distant horizon, it was touching this mist of demon flesh, and they were glinting in the air like millions of tiny fireflies.
And in the center of all that... was me.
Okay, I can see why the demons may hesitate a bit, but before I could feel any sense of accomplishment, their hesitation, which lasted perhaps half a second, ended, and then they came anyway, but the half-second was real, and I had to remember it.
These demons could know fear, and a part of me that I was not too proud of, wanted them to suffer... I did not just want to kill them, I wanted them to hurt!
I cast Arc Lightning, and the three demons came apart in vapor, and the count rose to a hundred and five.
The staff in my hand had begun to smoke from more than just the cast; the wood itself was smoldering, and the blue crystal at the tip was burning so hot that the claw that held it had begun to discolor, turning bright red.
If this were any other wood, it would have been ash a long time ago; even metal would have melted.
[Stored Essence: One Hundred and Five Demons]
Then dozens of demons came at me from three directions at once.
I had four percent Anima Depth, a charred staff that was beginning to show signs of structural failure, and a body that had been holding together because Mortal Shell was holding it together.
I had perhaps fifty demons converging on my position from the south, the west, and the south-west.
I could have cast one more time, perhaps two, and taken some of them.
The cast would have used the last of my Anima Depth. I would have crossed below two percent, and at two percent, Mortal Shell would not be enough to buffer the cost, and what was left of me would have started to come apart in real ways.
Even now, I think I have forgotten my name, but that did not matter.
I sneered at the approaching demons, turned the head of my staff toward my own skull, and I committed the last of my Anima Depth to a final combined Arc Lightning and Surge cast at point-blank range.
"My fate was my own... my death is my own."