The title was draining its stockpile to keep the pressure off me, and the reserve was not enough.

The title broke, and a shockwave erupted from my body that blasted the debris that surrounded me.

I could hardly focus on what was happening around me when the sensation of something rigid being snapped inside of me caused a heat in my chest that felt as if my heart had been set on fire.

All at once, whatever resistance the title had, gave way under a pressure that I had no reference point for, and I suddenly felt naked before the eyes of starving predators.

There were seven continents, and in all seven continents, Mages were among the most powerful factions, but it did not mean Anima were the only source of power in this world, and if you were perceptive, then you would have noted a section on my status screen that read Blessing.

Well, a blessing could only be given by a god. Yes, divinities exist in this world, but as mages, we disdained the thought of having our fate in the hands of a god when we could steer the course of our lives by our own strength.

At this moment, when I was stripped of the defenses of my title, and I stood naked in the face of evil... I wished I could pray to someone, something to save me.

I was so scared.

My soul suddenly shuddered, and I looked down at my staff and saw that it was dying. The blue crystal on it dimmed before it turned to ash, and the staff began to bend as it turned gray, and as I watched in horror, the decay spread into my hands.

The skin on the back of my left hand went grey as if the color was draining out of my skin, and then the texture changed as the skin itself began to separate from the meat beneath it, lifting in patches, peeling away in sheets that fell to the ground with a wet, soft sound.

The exposed muscle beneath my hand turned black, and it began to do the same thing the skin had done, pulling away from the bone in dark wet strings, sliding off in clumps that hit the cracked earth and lay there twitching.

The pain arrived on a delay. By the time my nervous system registered what was happening, my forearm was already a column of exposed bone with strips of putrefying tissue hanging from it.

My mouth hung open as the shock prevented any noise from emerging from my mouth. I could not even breathe, and then the rot reached my abdomen, and I knew that there were levels to pain.

I felt my belly open as the skin and the muscle of my stomach simply gave way, decaying through in the same wave that had taken my arms, and I felt the wet, heavy sensation of my own intestines sliding free of the cavity that had contained them, the long pink-grey coils unspooling out of me and pooling on the ground at my feet in steaming heaps.

The sound of the contents of my stomach hitting the ground was enough of a shock for me to look down... I should not have looked down.

My intestines were on the ground in front of me, still connected to the cavity of my body, and they were moving. Whether from the rot or from their own panic or from whatever the demon was doing to me, they were moving like snakes whose heads had been cut off.

Then my liver fell out, the dark heavy organ slid free of the open cavity of my abdomen and hit the ground with a flat wet thump that I felt through my legs, and behind it came something smaller, the spleen, perhaps, or one of the kidneys, I had not paid enough attention in the First Aid lectures to be certain, and they were piling on the ground at my feet alongside the intestines and I was still standing somehow, my body somehow upright through whatever was holding me up.

There were times I thought the innate resilience of a mage’s body was something to be proud of, and I wished I could go back in time and choke out younger Elric.

I tried to scream, my mouth opened, but what came out was not screaming... It was language.

"Khaaz... khaaz vel’tarakh... gorum sha’thrul..."

The syllables were leaving my throat in a voice that was not mine, guttural, rhythmic, harsh in a way that human throats were not built for. The consonants were doubled and doubled again, the vowels pulled long and dark from somewhere below where my voice usually lived.

It was not a language I knew, as it seemed as if it was being dragged from the depths of my soul. My jaw was working without my permission, and the words kept coming, despite the fact that I could feel my Anima Depth descending below ten percent, almost as if my soul was being burned to ash just for saying these words.

"Nargh thur’kazak... vel’tar gorum... shaaz..."

I could not stop saying them. The demonic speech was pouring out of me the way blood pours out of a wound, automatic and continuous, and underneath it I could hear my own voice trying to scream, trapped behind the language that had taken my mouth.

[Demonology 24 → 31 (Acolyte) — Rare — Unregistered]

The notification arrived in the middle of the syllables, and I understood it even as the words kept coming, that something inside my mind was learning the speech even as my body was destroying itself.

Then my bones began to change.

The exposed bone of my left forearm, the radius and ulna sharpened, and the two bones extended themselves past the wrist, growing forward in a process I felt as a deep pulling agony in the joint, and the ends of them tapered and hardened and became long, thin spears of bone.

My left arm whipped sideways, and the bone-spears that had been my hand drove into my own ribs, punching through what remained of the Acolyte robe and the skin and the muscle and into the chest cavity.

The bones in my chest cracked open as the lung on the left side of my body collapsed when the spear pierced it, and I was left with the warm, wet feeling of more blood filling spaces it had not been in a moment ago.

A silky smooth voice echoed in my head, "Tell me the name of God, child?"