The bell charm at the head of my staff rang once every twenty seconds, struck by the disc when the staff swung at the right angle, and this sound gave me warmth even in the midst of this hell.
This sound gave me warmth, but to the demons, it was their death knell.
The twentieth wave broke, the twenty-first, the twenty-second... Around this time, the numbers began to blur together.
The kill count had passed four thousand somewhere, and my Anima Depth was at thirty percent, and I had not soul-casted yet.
The cracked nine percent was still cracked but not deeper, and the Strained Soul Condition was holding at the level I saw when I woke up.
I was coming to the conclusion that if nothing changes, and I keep casting the way I should, then I was not going to die overwhelmed.
If I were going to die, it would be when something arrived that my rhythm of combat could not handle.
[Stored Essence: 4,103]
I tried to imagine what those who were responsible for this were thinking when they saw me tearing through thousands of demons.
I hardly recognized myself, let alone what they would be feeling as they looked at me.
Commander Rel... Rex... Orath... the Conclave of Ysmar... the goat-horned demon.
These were my enemies. With the nature of the loop, they did not know that I knew of their existence, since I had not seen any evidence that anyone else was aware that I was in the loop.
Then I thought about Dara, and the two times I had watched her die... and the strange emotions that I felt from her in both of those cases.
As long as I keep pushing forward, the answers to these questions will be found in time... for now, I need to kill.
∞
The next wave was the smallest the eruption had produced.
I noticed because the pattern of slaughter I had going had been calibrated to the size of the wave, and the cycle’s timing was off when the wave that crested the lip turned out to be only sixty demons instead of the two hundred I had expected.
By now, the entire bowl had become filled with bodies, and the lip of the wall was barely three feet, no longer a lip, but my mind was not fixated on finding a new term for it.
What would it take to fill up a bowl of earth about forty meters across... You don’t need to think too hard on this one; the answer is thousands of bodies.
I let the Avatar take this diminished wave with a standard discharge-harvest sweep. Sixty demons stunned, sixty melee kills.
During the time my body was killing, my Anima Depth was slowly regaining its stores.
Despite how fierce the battle had been, with the aid of the Hollow Avatar, I was able to fully focus on what was happening to my Anima Depth and the Hollow Space behind it.
Nothing much changed in the Hollow Space, or should I say, I could feel a lot was changing inside it, as my skills and spells were undoubtedly growing, but I could not see into the Hollow Space.
However, this was different from my Anima Depth, where I could see everything, and my sight was even clearer now that a portion of my Anima was glowing.
I noted something concerning. Although I was being careful not to use the glowing part of my soul, some of my new Anima that was being regenerated in my Depth was glowing with the light of my new Anima.
Damn, as if I was not under enough pressure already.
My Anima Depth could not take any more pressure, and I suspected that if I used my new Anima, it would rapidly replace my older one.
This matter could no longer wait for long; I needed to deal with this next, or my Anima Depth would shatter.
The wave was finished in eight seconds instead of twenty, and the next wave was smaller still, and then, the wave after that did not come.
My eyes widened... had I killed them all?
No, the eruption was still happening, and I could feel the cracks across the eastern face, still producing demons.
The only thing different was that the signatures of the demons were not coming toward me anymore, as if an intelligence was holding them back.
I had been assessed to be greater than anything these chitin demons could overcome, and something else was about to arrive.
I lifted my eyes to the red sky above the bowl and waited. I did not know which of my previous killers would be coming, and I wondered if I was enough to take them at my present state.
The second foghorn blew, and apart from the long droning sound, I swear I could hear a name.
I sat down cross-legged on the mounds of demonic bodies, resting my back against the limbs that shot out from the pile.
The red clouds above the eastern ridge rippled, and the goat-horned demon came down from the heavens.
I saw it from across four kilometres, the four-eyed silhouette burning against the red sky, the goat horns curving back from the skull, the body suspended without obvious means of support.
A shadow construct was already extending from its left side like a limb the size of a wagon.
The same demon that had killed me twice and had spoken words of madness to my soul was now coming for me again.
[Stored Essence: 4,861]
∞
The horned demon would close the four kilometres in less than thirty seconds. Adept-tier flight, presumably.
However, there was something about the demon that made it seem more dangerous than a normal Adept.
What did I have? My Anima Depth was cracked; I had about thirty percent inside my reservoir, but I could use about sixteen percent of it before I began to dip into my new Anima and the core of my being.
I had killed nearly five thousand demons, but I had not killed anything close to the horned demon.
The battle rhythm that had worked across the waves would not work here. The horned demon was not a chitin demon at scale. It was a different kind of entity, and the combination I had going on, however efficient, was not going to kill it.
From a distance, I could feel a wave of hate moving ahead of this demon, and I knew that I needed something else to fight.
I needed everything.