What was amazing and horrifying about moving at this sort of insane speed was that you could see that you were doing something absolutely diabolical to your enemy, and yet their mind could not catch up to your actions, and the demon was still staring at my previous position, and I wondered if he was still seeing me there even when I was already beside him.

The head of the staff, now in the shape of a fist after assimilating the Focus Crystal, punched through the chitin membrane that protected the demon’s hollow chamber, and the moment I pushed my staff inside his body, I unleashed a Lightning Cascade discharged alongside Surge using every Anima that I could push into this skill through the entry point.

The Cascade branched into the Sorcerer’s interior organs, finding every yellow-thread channel, every membrane junction, every conductor in the body.

The Sorcerer’s hollow chamber, which was the crucible at the centre of his thorax that should have been the engine of his magic, superheated and ruptured.

Three seconds of Lightning Incarnate remaining, and I was just realizing that pushing so much power close to the Flame Essence was a good way to cause the sort of explosion that would erase me to atoms.

That would have been an embarrassing way to die.

In my lightning form, I could feel the red crystal at the heart of his skull begin to vibrate. His four eyes lost coherence and rolled in opposite directions.

The Sorcerer’s mouth was open and producing demonic syllables that almost sounded like a name.

Two seconds.

The Sorcerer died.

One second.

I materialised.

∞

My body, which had been lightning reassembled at the position of the strike. My hand was on the staff whose top half was buried in the Sorcerer’s chest.

The Sorcerer’s body was upright, but there was no life in him anymore.

The strangeness of regaining my fleshy body again was the weirdest part of the whole sequence of getting back my body.

I had been more, and now I was less. Coming back to one body, one position, one set of eyes after having been a distributed sphere of voltage felt like being put inside a box.

My skin felt small, and my senses were narrowed. I was, briefly, claustrophobic in my own skin.

I shuddered, but the feeling passed. Lightning Incarnate was powerful, but like Hollow Avatar, there were clearly side effects to this skill.

My body did not suffer any damage, which was a good thing since I followed the guidelines of the skill, but there was a mental cost to it as well.

However, with the nature of the loop and the way I was handling my growth, I would not be obeying this rule of going slow, and every skill I had would be pushed past the limit until I was broken. Only then could I grow at speeds that would make my death worth it.

I had a moment of realization, and I rapidly switched over to my hollow state, and I barely did this before a soul scream tore out of the dead body of the demon.

I stumbled as my brain felt as if it were being stabbed by blades, and I nearly fell to my knees.

I was dimly aware that all around me, for thousands of meters, Khaaz demons were collapsing to the ground, their very souls burned out of them from the Sorcerer’s dying scream.

For three minutes, I was stunned in place, with only the silent presence of the Hollow Avatar in my head.

After a while, the feeling passed, and I fell to my knees beside the demon, who had not entirely collapsed to the ground because it was being propped up by my staff that was still inside his chest.

I leaned close to the demon and whispered in a conversational tone. "You should have started with the shadow construct, better yet, stay in the air. I cannot fly... yet."

I twisted the staff and pulled it out, and the shadow construct at the demon’s side, half-summoned, collapsed into a dark cube that bounced twice on the charred grass.

I glanced at the face of the demon, and it was frozen in surprise. I had killed the demon so quickly that I was not sure he knew when he died.

This bastard had died too quickly.

"Pah, I burned worlds," I faked the tone of the demon, as I spat to the side, "But a sixteen years old killed you before you could blink.

[Second Earth Gate — Unlock Requirement met]

I knelt beside the corpse, and I looked down at my hands, and they were shaking. I did not know if it was adrenaline or the aftermath of Lightning Incarnate or simply the fact that I had just killed the thing that had been haunting my nightmares for fifteen loops.

Holding back from unlocking the second Earth Gate since I did not want any unknown factor that would destabilize what I was about to do, I began to gather the materials I needed for the upgrade of Cor Telluris.

It was hard to get the red crystal from the demon’s head without the claw of a Khaazim Demon, but I did this by carefully pushing the power of lightning through the forehead of the demon for several minutes until the head exploded from the internal pressure.

Snatching the demon crystal, I brought the shadow core and the wisps of flame essence I could gather with my staff and brought them closer to my chest.

I felt the core inside me sort of rotate, and it drew the materials in my hands into my chest, burning through my skin and muscle and settling into my heart.

Cold sweat poured out of my forehead at the pain, and even though I was aware at the back of my mind that I could suppress this pain by switching to my Hollow State, I did not; this pain was important, this fear and the joy I felt in this victory were important.

It was how Elric Voss stood up.