The soul was gone, deliberately shattered by me, after Elric’s attempt to fight beyond his limit had brought his soul to the brink of ruin.

The reservoir that had held his Anima since the day his depth first stirred was rubble. The Anima that had filled it was already evacuated into the new channels. What remained where his soul had been was an absence, and the absence had a number.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 0]

Zero.

A normal mage at zero is a corpse. The soul is the engine; remove it, and the body is meat that has not yet been told to stop.

But this body had the Hollow Space behind it, the deeper seat the welded state had carved, and so the body did not stop. It lay curled in the ash, and it did not die, because the thing that kept it alive was no longer the soul.

I began to push Creation-Anima into the vacancy.

This was the delicate part. The Hollow Space wanted the emptiness, and it would have spread to fill the void the soul had left, and if it filled the void, then Elric would be gone, the boy dissolved into the cold place, and only the framework remained.

This part of me would prefer this state; it would make Elric a more efficient demon slayer, but the presence of his soul gave me combat options that were not available to me in my present broken state, and so it was in my greatest benefit for this soul to survive.

Elric had seen the warning attached to the Hollow Avatar skill. This was the warning, made literal. So I moved fast, flooding the vacancy with the silver-white Creation-Anima before the Hollow Space could claim it, and the Creation-Anima took the shape of the absence the way water takes the shape of a cup.

A new Anima Depth began to form, born from a higher order Anima that was pure without the laws of this world to constrain its form and purpose.

I watched it form, and I knew that my gamble had paid off; what was being created was of the Celestial-grade, where the old had been mortal.

I saw it come into being the way coal comes into being inside a fire, and I began to simulate its utility.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 0 → 1]

An unexpected faint cry emerged from the place of the newly born Anima Depth; it sounded like the cry of a baby, but I could not find any visible source from which that noise could come. I logged this discrepancy and continued to monitor the rise of the Anima Depth, peeling away part of my mind to focus on fully grafting the Celestial Marrow to the bones of Elric.

[Effective Operating Capacity: 1 → 2 → 4]

Slowly. The new depth had to establish itself, and establishment took time, and time was the one resource I did not control, because the demons had arrived.

Khaaz, in the tens of thousands, cresting the ridge and pouring down the slope toward the curled body in the ash. And behind them, moving through the swarm with the heavier tread of a higher variant, the Khaazim.

They were larger and armoured, whereas the Khaaz were merely chitined. Coordinating the lesser demons toward the one piece of meat in the bowl that had not yet stopped moving.

I ran the calculation.

I could rebuild the soul, or I could defend the body. I could not do both. The rebuild required my full allocation, where every part of me bent to the work of keeping the Hollow Space out of the vacancy and coaxing the Creation-Anima into a depth that would hold.

The Hollow Space underneath the newly born Anima Depth was always hungry, and it was constantly exerting pressure that I needed to constantly monitor.

I was using this pressure to accelerate the formation of the Anima Depth, but it would only take a small slip of attention to break all this work. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Defence required motor control, volition, the casting of a spell, and those were not mine to give. The body would obey me for surgery. It would not fight for me. Fighting required the one thing I could not supply.

It required Elric.

I reached up through the meld, into the deep place where I had let him sink so the pain would reach him only as statistics, and I woke him up.

∞

I came up out of the deep the way a man comes up out of deep water with stones sewn into his pockets.

I was too slow, and it hurt pushing through that pressure to come to the light. My Anima Depth was my warmth in the cold, and without it, I had no business pushing my way out of the dark, but I needed to do this... I needed to stand.

The instant my attention crossed back into the front of myself, the buffer came off. Down in the meld, the Avatar had been kind enough, or efficient enough, to render the pain as numbers.

Endurance falling.

Capacity at four.

Marrow integration at sixty percent.

Numbers I could look at without dying of them. Up here, there were no numbers.

Up here, my marrow was being grown into my bones, and my bones did not want it. Up here, my soul was a hole that something was pouring light into, and the light burned going in, and behind the hole, the cold place pressed and pressed and wanted the hole for itself.

Up here, every bone in my body was a fresh wound, and every drop of blood was being chewed through and replaced, and the pain... by all the lights in heaven, the pain.

I want to tell you I rose to the occasion. The truth is that for the first second, I simply screamed, except no sound came out, because my body did not have the spare capacity to scream with.

Then I saw the Khaaz. They were forty metres out and closing. Tens of thousands of them, and the heavier shapes behind, all coming for a single target, a curled thing in the ash, surrounded by his drying blood... me, my body, that was being rebuilt.

If they reached it now, mid-rebuild, soul at four percent, marrow half-set, they would not need to do much. A single Khaaz would be enough.

The operation would fail, and I would die not having finished becoming what the dying was supposed to be for.

And some part of me, the part my father put there, said the thing it always said.

The question is not whether you can win. The question is whether you stand up.

I could not stand up. My legs were full of marrow that did not yet know how to be marrow.

So I did the next thing, and I reached for the staff.