I stood in the silence that followed with a staff that was almost too hot to hold.

My hands were shaking, and I felt an emptiness in my channels that reflected the eight percent Anima Depth in my soul.

I don’t know if I could even cast a normal spark without collapsing in pain because I was sure that I had burned the channels inside my body, and I would need months to heal.

Then the notifications arrived.

[Spark 22 → 28 (Initiate)]

[Surge 33 → 38 (Acolyte)]

[Anima Depth 37 → 41 (Acolyte)]

[Concentration 32 → 35 (Acolyte)]

[Marksman 18 → 22 (Initiate)]

[Observation 27 → 31 (Initiate)]

[Endurance 19 → 24 (Initiate)]

[Demonology 10 → 15 (Initiate) — Rare — Unregistered]

[First Aid 8 → 11 (Initiate)]

I read them in the order they arrived and felt the weight of each one. This was the testament of my victory, a record that I had killed something that no Acolyte was meant to kill.

The numbers were the largest single-loop gain I had recorded, and I was still alive, meaning there was opportunity for more progress.

Spark at twenty-eight, two ranks from the Acolyte threshold. Surge climbing fast and my Anima Depth growing faster than it should have been able to grow, I could already feel the cool waves of power flowing through my channels as if my blood had turned to ice.

In any other time, this would be uncomfortable, but it was what I needed at the moment as my channels and my body were burning, and anyone who touched my skin would believe I had an intense fever.

Demonology at fourteen from the accumulated observation of watching this demon fail in every way it knew how to fail.

The demon was dead. I had killed it. One combined cast and six follow-ups, crossing my own limit at the end, and since I had no way to tell these demons apart except by their size, I believed in my mind that this was the first demon that had killed me in every possible way across every loop and now it was headless on the ground of the expedition camp at the base of the pyramid and was not going to get back up.

If I was wrong, then in the future I aimed to kill all of them to correct that mistake. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

I blinked at that bloodthirsty thought, but whatever inhibition I had was gone when the memories of my friends butchered like animals entered my mind. To know that everything they were about to be brutally ended very soon, threw away any thought of pity or restraint in my heart.

I looked at the demon for exactly as long as I could afford to, which was three seconds, and then I turned to face the camp, and my eyes widened a bit.

They came from everywhere.

I had been so focused on the first demon, on the kill, on the sequence, on what each cast was doing, that the wider awareness Death-Touched provided had narrowed to a single point.

Now it expanded back to its full range, and what it showed me was not six cold spots or ten cold spots.

There were dozens, perhaps even more, but it seemed my mind could only gather a limited amount of data before it could no longer give me any more useful information.

Dozens of targeting points scattered across my skin, each one a demon somewhere in the camp that had marked me, and the quality of the marking was different from anything I had felt before.

It was somehow hotter than cold. Something that felt, through the Death-Touched sense, like attention.

They had been watching me kill the first one.

The thought arrived with the specific chill of something that mattered enormously and which I had no time to think about properly. I filed it under Demonology and reached inward for my Anima Depth and found eight percent and understood that I was going to die in the next few seconds, regardless of what I did next.

I had grown stronger than when I woke up, but I needed time to digest that strength. My Anima Depths were still empty, and a few hours of meditation were needed to bring them back up to full. My staff was rapidly nearing its limits, and my body would give out before my staff.

The first one reached me from the left, and I cast Threadwork, groaning from the pain that ripped through my channels, as I tried to create a defensive shield in front of me, but it was thin and weak, and it would barely stop a fly.

It flickered against a demon, and barely did anything, and then they were all around me, and the cold spots covered my entire body, and I raised my staff one final time with nothing behind it and thought about the dead demon on the ground and thought: I killed one.

Then they reached me, and I felt dozens of their limbs pierce through my body. I was raised up in the air, and I could barely scream through my shredded lungs before I was torn to pieces.

®

Wind.... Canvas ceiling.... Memories of pain.

The silver orb floating beside my head, with my sister’s voice sealed inside it, but I could not hear them, as for a moment, my body still held on to the phantom pain of being torn to pieces.

This was another danger of having a greater soul; it was that death was longer, as my mind could hold on to my flesh far longer than it should.

Most mages would only experience this pain once, but every time I died, this pain grew worse.

Should I run? Maybe I should, but I had just made my first great leap in power, and would it not be a shame that I did not build upon it?

I sighed and called up my status screen, glancing at the first thing that entered my mind.

[Soul Condition: Stable]

Odd, I would think that my soul may be a bit strained, but it seemed this loop was more mysterious than I gave it credit.

And then, before the usual cascade of skill notifications, something I had not seen before.

[New Title Unlocked: Demon Slayer]