My own lightning would no longer shred my channels at ordinary commitments, the cost-per-cast would drop to something I could sustain for a long time, and the channels that ran through my flesh would now conduct without burning what they conducted through.
As it is now, I believe I could cast Spark almost indefinitely; the cost of this spell was far below the regenerative power of my Anima Depth.
I had to be a little careful with Arc Lightning, but I should be able to cast it for as long as I want. The scene where I had to be micromanaging my Anima Stores would soon be a thing of the past.
This was the gain that translated most directly into combat sustainability. I could cast harder, longer, and more often, without paying the per-cast price that had limited every previous loop.
My combat ability was going to change, and yet this was not all the breakthroughs that I had.
Lightning Cascade at thirty-one was the gain I had not expected. The discipline had been at rank one at the wake of this loop. Thirty ranks in a single combat sequence was the kind of growth the magus tradition’s training systems did not produce.
Then I realized that the system was tracking not just the casts but the configuration discoveries. Every time the branching geometry had extended past where the rank-one description had predicted, the system had logged the extension as practice equivalent to weeks of ordinary work.
Lightning Cascade at thirty-one was a different spell than Cascade at one. The reach would now extend across forty metres instead of ten. The branching would split eight or nine times by default rather than three. The sustained channel would hold for thirty or forty seconds rather than three.
I now had a battlefield-clearing discipline, and the discipline was still well short of its Adept-tier ceiling.
Arc Lightning at fifty-nine was one rank from the Adept threshold, and although I did not use it in the battle, Lightning Cascade drew parts of its abilities from the foundation of Arc Lightning, and in this manner, anytime I used Lightning Cascade, I was indirectly training Arc Lightning.
This is the result of naturally growing your spell as a mage. Not every mage could naturally adapt their spells for combat, since it was easier and maybe better to find the spells you want in the Repository; however, my situation was different.
If I were not in the loop, then my first Lightning Spell would not have been Arc Lightning due to the cost and the severe effect it had on my body, and I would have gone for Deep Shock or Spark Bolt, since these spells grew fast and were easier on the body and channels.
However, the loop had forced my body to take the most destructive spells under the Lightning discipline, and it was transforming me into what my teachers call a Battle Mage.
The next loop, or the loop after, the discipline would cross sixty and become the qualitatively different skill the texts described. The crossing would change what Arc Lightning could do. I would not know exactly what until I crossed it.
Surge was getting increasingly closer to the Adept tier without my noticing during combat.
The amplification skill that had been threshold-bound at fifty was now operating in the territory where it could double the effective output of any spell it modified.
Lightning Cascade through Surge and then through the transformed staff was, in retrospect, why the kill counts had climbed so steeply in waves five and six.
Surge had been doing more than I had credited it for, and now that it was at the Adept tier, I expected that my next combat would feel different again.
Staff Resonance at thirty-eight was a substantial jump from twenty-eight. The staff transformation and the sustained Cascade channeling through the transformed staff had built the bond between the staff and me at a rate the ordinary practice of holding-and-casting would not produce.
My staff had transformed into the Stormbound Fuchsia, and if I held my hand to my staff and called it to me, then the Elemental Fuchsia staff would begin this transformation again.
My spells were too violent, and my staff did not have the time or the Focus Crystals to ensure the smooth transition of the staff to a higher tier.
Then the thought from that hollow place entered my mind as it did during my last loop.
"Why are you not using Threadwork to hold the staff together and guide its transformation?"
Why? Because it’s impossible, that’s why.
I knew maybe one hundred and fifty lattice configurations for my Threadwork, which was a lot for an Acolyte, but nothing about what I knew would teach me how to thread this power through a simple, yet incredibly complicated structure like a mage’s staff.
However, that hollow part of me at that moment did not think it was impossible.
I closed my eyes and placed that thought to the side. I will deal with it soon, but I needed to understand the full change that had happened within me first.
All my auxiliary skills had climbed across the board. The most significant was Demonology, which had jumped fifteen ranks.
No doubt it came from killing so many demons and my close observation of the horned demon, drinking demon blood, and the cumulative engagement with chitin demons at melee range.
As much as these events shocked me, I knew that this was me, just stripped down of everything that made me Elric, leaving a shell that knew only survival by any means necessary.
Every one of the actions I took for my survival had pushed Demonology past where two years of Academy instruction would have taken it.
Demonology at fifty-four was now well into the Acolyte tier, with six ranks to the Adept threshold. Future loops would need to push it further if I wanted to begin understanding what the demons actually were, where the portals beneath the cracks led, and what the horned demon’s Achon-Maker-Daemon framework meant.
Of course, I did not forget about this part, and I knew that all the mysteries were tied to my Demon Slayer Title.
It almost felt as if this Title was the doorway to a different world that I could not imagine, and now the Earth Gate on the title no longer appears to be a threshold for me to cross, but gates that lead to a different world.
It was like the more gates I crossed, the deeper into this madness I would enter.
It was a grim thought, and I allowed it to sit with me for a while.