There was not much time for me to practice because I wanted to make sure my Anima Depth was near the top, so I could fight at my best.

Behind me, Mage Torvin passed and nodded at our efforts. It was a small thing, but every piece of information could turn out to be valuable for the expedition, and I noticed Bari and Dara pecking up when they noticed this attention.

I glanced over at Rex and still noticed that he was beside the cookfire, but he seemed to be scribbling away at what appeared to be a metallic tablet.

Keeping an eye on him, I noted that Commander Rel swept the camp and found nothing requiring intervention and went to speak with Orath at the east face, where the old scholar stood with his private instrument pressed against the black surface, white head bowed.

Now that I was watching, I saw the way she had glanced at Rex, and knew she was keeping her eyes on him, when she barely bothered with the rest of us.

Pushing away these thoughts that I was not sure would lead anywhere, I began the crux of my experiments and practice, as I tested the dual channel next. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

This sort of advanced spellcasting was encouraged when our Anima Depths had reached at least 50, nearing the peak of the Acolyte level, meaning our channels were much more durable and could handle more punishment, but I decided to skip over the long learning curve. I needed power now, not five years in the future.

Closing my eyes for a brief moment, I channeled Spark and Surge and held them both simultaneously. This was the exact combination that had cost me significant focus alongside Anima in previous loops.

I opened both without casting, just holding the structure of both channels at once, and felt the difference immediately.

The focus cost was a fraction of what it had been. It was not gone exactly, as the dual channel still required more than a single, but it was no longer fighting my Concentration to exist. The grip covers both without strain, the way a hand covers two objects rather than one, more to hold, but the hand does not care.

I felt a burst of excitement inside when I understood that I was going to be able to sustain the Surge-Spark combination across multiple casts rather than spending everything on one.

I knew that I was more talented than most in channeling and spell casting, even if I lacked the raw oomph that Bari had with his Anima Depth, which I was sure approached 45, and Dara’s greater Anima Sensitivity, but my rate of growth had been thrilling.

There was no reason I needed to push myself like this before in my life, since we were taught to respect magic, and knew how fragile our souls were as Acolyte... one misstep and it was over.

And now, without this fear of shattering my channels, I was making more progress in a single hour than I expected to make for months or years to come in the future.

We were expected to spend ten years as Acolytes before making the push for Adepts, becoming fully fledged mages, and our learning path had been carefully designed after more than ten thousand years of Magus Civilization to produce mages in the most efficient way possible.

I was now breaking that tradition, and I found that I kind of liked it.

The fact that I could hold Surge and Spark comfortably inside me changed the calculation significantly.

Perhaps I could be more effective against the demons this time around.

[Spark 21 → 22 (Initiate)]

Nice!

At the twenty-third minute, Dara went still.

"Do you feel that?" she said quietly.

Closing my eyes, I sighed, "Yes," I said. "I feel them... death is coming."

Dara looked at me with wide eyes, but I was no longer focusing on what my friends would think.

I planted my feet, and widened my stance, and felt Death-Touched settle across my awareness, the cold spots not yet present but the mechanism ready.

The Demonology knowledge in the back of my mind was more organized this morning than it had been mid-loop, the accumulated observation from several deaths finding its structure, assembling a picture of the first demon from angles I had not been able to see when I was simply trying to survive it.

The jaw structure, the tendril response, the progressive failure pattern, and the difference between temporary disruption and what I hoped would soon become permanent damage.

What I needed to understand this loop was what permanent required. The instinctive Surge-Spark merge at low reserves had produced darkening at the tendrils; this was structural damage rather than surface disruption.

If I could produce that result from the first cast, with full Anima Depth and Concentration holding both channels steady across the sequence, the outcome might be entirely different.

It was a theory, and I was about to test it.

"Here we go," I whispered to myself, and the ground cracked.

East to west, four meters ahead, the world breaking its own rules as I had become used to seeing, the earth should not break like this.

I had the presence of mind to glance towards Rex’s position and I noticed that he was gone, then I could no longer care about this as the first demon came through and I opened both channels simultaneously, Spark and Surge together from the opening cast, full Anima Depth behind the combination, Concentration holding both without the strain that would have fractured the dual channel in any earlier loop.

There was a sort of faint haze that surrounded the head of my staff, and then what left my staff was not the thin emergency discharge of previous attempts. It was the full weight of a deliberate combined cast, properly held, properly aimed, with everything behind it that I had spent this entire practice session preparing.

A burst of yellow light that suspiciously looked like lightning shot out of the staff, and I could feel my staff heating up underneath my fingers as the small arc of lightning hit the jaw cluster of the demon before it had covered four meters.

The tendrils darkened from tip to base in the same instant the paralysis took hold, and the demon collapsed, without even letting out a sound.