I missed the moment of discovery when it happened. Well, there was always a chance to miss a lot of things when you are focused on butchering demons.
It happened during the eighth wave, in the middle of a Lightning Cascade cast, when I had loaded the channels with the Anima the cast required and was holding the discharge for the extra second that produced the wider branching.
The Anima had been converted to lightning in the channels by Lightning Resonance, and the lightning was waiting to leave through the staff.
But I had missed two demons who were not cooked as thoroughly as they should, and the world sort of slowed down when they both lunged at me from behind.
In any previous loop, this would be the final stroke that would lead to my death, since I would not be able to avoid these demons, and if I turned to engage them, I would be swarmed and torn apart by the wave behind me.
From the surface, it would appear as if I was having an easy time butchering these demons, but I was at the edge of death.
One mistake would kill me, and I had just made that mistake; however, I now had new tools.
My body was filled with lightning that I could not direct to my staff before I was knocked down, and so I instinctively allowed the Hollow Avatar to take my body.
The Avatar did not hesitate. I did not know what it was thinking, and I had to burn my soul to nothing before I would be able to follow its thought process.
Hollow Avatar did not move as I thought it would; instead, it finished the cast I was about to make, but what emerged from my staff was different from Lightning Cascade.
I could briefly sense that numerous tiny channels both in my body and my staff were suddenly engaged, and the lightning that erupted from my staff was like a massive net that expanded in a circle, shredding the demons that were about to slam into me to ash and continuing to the wave’s leading edge, taking ninety demons in a single sustained channel.
The Hollow Avatar had used the lightning in my body, in a new spell configuration!
Looking back now, I almost wanted to slap myself at how obvious this should have been from the start.
The Avatar could not draw Anima from the reservoir; it also could not cast spells from scratch. But the Avatar could use lightning already in the channels.
By all the lights in heaven. It had shown me this capability from the start, but it wasn’t until I was at the verge of death that my mind did what I may have unconsciously noted.
The Anima that I had converted before switching modes was no longer Anima; it was lightning, sitting in the channels, waiting to leave, and the Avatar could spend it.
The Avatar’s deployment did not have to be limited to passive discharge anymore; I had been wasting its true capabilities.
Sure, this would break the tempo that I had going on, and every spell it unleashed would not grow my proficiency with those spells... but that was just the trade-offs for me multiplying my combat ability.
I did not recognize the last spell used by the Hollow Avatar, but I was not paying much attention, and it had been an incredibly complex spell, wielded in a manner that was strange to me.
There was no time to think further on this spell, since I decided to slowly observe this process, even though it felt almost too complex for my mind to grasp.
I pulled control back, and the world tilted faintly as it always did at the handoff, and I laughed.
I don’t care if anyone saw me surrounded by demons and under a red sky, laughing like I had gone mad.
My laugh came from me finding a piece of a puzzle that the puzzle’s designers had presumably never intended to be put together that way.
∞
The ninth wave taught me how to use this new mechanic better.
I drew Anima into the channels and let Lightning Resonance convert the volume to charged lightning, and I switched to Avatar before the discharge could be released.
The Avatar finished the cast through the staff. What emerged from my staff resembled a massive lightning blade that swept horizontally at a height that caught the demons mid-leap rather than at ground level, and the wave fell in two major pieces.
[Stored Essence: 1,983]
Hundred and thirty kills in a single combined cast. The Avatar’s geometry was sharper than mine.
What was important to note was that I had just figured out that the Hollow Avatar was still using Lightning Cascade, but it was using the channels in my body from Lightning Resonance to bend this spell into configurations that felt almost impossible.
I had been casting Cascade in the geometry that the system’s blueprint had taught me. The Avatar had been studying the Lightning at a level below conscious technique, and finding the shape that the discipline actually wanted, maybe it even went beyond that.
I rapidly switched between both states as more waves came down at me in a flood, and the ground was beginning to shake from their weight.
It was almost as if the earth itself had transformed into this flood of demons, and I was fighting against the entire world.
The tenth wave fell at one hundred and seventy kills. The eleventh fell at two hundred. The twelfth fell at two hundred and forty.
The kill rate was climbing because each cast through the Avatar was teaching me how the next cast should be shaped, and each cast through the Avatar was also teaching the Avatar how the body responded to the loaded Anima, and the two trajectories were compounding.
[Stored Essence: 2,597]
I had passed the previous loop total kill count somewhere in the eleventh wave.
I did not stop to register it. The waves were coming faster now. The eruption was producing demons at a rate exceeding the last loop, and I suspected that the swarm’s coordination had detected the kill rate at my position and was redirecting more of the eruption’s output toward the bowl.
It did not matter why. I was killing at the rate the swarm could come at me.
The pattern stabilised: load, switch, Avatar Lightning Cascade, switch back, melee through the stun-sweep, regenerate Anima, load again. The cycle was approximately twenty seconds per round of combat, and each round produced one hundred and fifty to two hundred kills.
I was a battery, a marksman, and a butcher.
And what almost made me laugh again was that my body was holding.