From the reports I have read, it was usually the body of the mage that failed before their staff, unless that mage was using a staff that was far below their level.

However, the Elemental Fuschia branch that was used to make my staff was extremely elemental resistant, and could even follow me till I reach the peak of the Adept Stage, but the only problem it was having was that it could not properly follow my rate of growth.

As I said before, this staff was alive, but it was more like a tree, and its growth could not just be accelerated at a moment’s notice. Even the resonance was still slowly changing the body of the staff as I was using it, but that would take days and not minutes.

I noticed this gap after the eight-demon kill. The wood at the tip of the staff, near the silver claw that held the blue crystal, had darkened, as the surface oils of the ashwood evaporated from the heat of the sustained casting.

The grain of the wood was beginning to show the kind of pale stress lines that wood shows when it has been forced past its tolerance.

The blue crystal at the tip was hotter than I had ever felt it. I could even see the heat distortion in the air around it, a faint shimmer that had not been there before.

Staff Resonance was doing its work, the bond between staff and caster preventing the wood from combusting, but the staff was paying for the casts with its own integrity.

The staff had a limit, but I would worry about that later.

®

The next demons that came at me were in a single file procession of seven, moving in the searching pattern that suggested they had locked onto my position and were converging.

I cast Arc Lightning seven times in sequence, pure Arc Lightning, no Surge, single-target precision casts at the lowest Anima cost, and the seven demons died one at a time in the rhythm of a metronome.

Two seconds per kill. Fourteen seconds total.

[Stored Essence: Thirty-Eight Demons] [Arc Lightning 41 → 43 (Acolyte)]

Even if I wanted to use Surge, my staff needed time to recover, and I had never thought in my entire life that this could ever be a problem that I had to worry about.

I noted that the Anima cost of single-target Arc Lightning had dropped from three percent to two percent at the new rank, which shocked and delighted me at the same time.

Don’t mind the pun.

I also noted that I was approaching twenty-five percent Anima Depth, and that the staff was now very visibly charred, alongside my breathing becoming heavier.

It was straining to move that much Anima that had been converted to lightning through my channels, and my heart was racing as if I had been running for miles; however, I did not sweat much, which surprised me, and I wondered if it was a result of both my Endurance and Mortal Shell.

However, I could not think much about this, because the convergence of demons from my rampage was now close to me, as not too far from me were twenty-five demons coming at me from a broken trench that had not been visible from my approach angle.

Whispering sweet nothings to my staff for it to endure my magic, I committed a five percent Anima cast and chained through twelve demons before the chain broke, then another five percent cast that chained through the remaining thirteen.

[Stored Essence: Sixty-Three Demons] [Demon Slayer — First Earth Gate: Threshold reached, evolution pending]

[Staff Resonance 16 → 19 (Initiate — Rare)]

I stopped walking as I stared at the notification, Threshold reached.

The title was at the gate; however, this gate was not fully open, evolution pending, but the threshold had been reached.

Sixty-three kills had brought the title to the boundary of whatever it became at its first evolution, yet the system was telling me that evolution was waiting on something.

I did not know what it was waiting on. More kills, perhaps. Or higher-ranked kills. Or a specific condition I had not yet met.

It would seem that the title needed something more, and it would be up to me to find out what.

Still, it did not appear like I could stop accumulating demon essence, so with fifteen percent Anima Depth, I readied myself for the flood.

I crossed back through the center of the camp, pulled by the densest concentration of demons, and the path I cut took me across the line of sight of the cookfire.

Bari was there, he was crouched behind one of the fallen instrument tables, with Dara beside him, and Aldis the cook, who was somehow still alive, and one of the senior porters whose name I had never learned.

They had survived this far because the wave that should have crossed through the center of the camp had been intercepted by my chain casts at the western edge.

Bari saw me as I passed, and his eyebrows pulled slightly together, with his mouth opening a fraction. My sight was now good enough that I could not just see the surprise and confusion in his eyes; there was also fear.

However, I don’t know if that fear was for me or of me, but I would like to think it was for the demons.

I had been Elric to him this morning, who ranked forty-seven in their cohort, and was the weakest Acolyte here; now, in the blink of an eye, I was something else.

A part of me wondered if he believed that our friendship was a lie and if I had been deceiving him from the start, and this thought hurt more than I expected.

It was a good thing that I was in danger, and there were many things around me to focus my mind on.

The staff in my hand was charred and smoking, and my breath was visible in the cold air around me as something more than steam.

There were demon corpses stacked in a rough trail behind me that the survivors could see if they looked, and they were looking. The trail led from the western edge of the camp through the fallen tents and across the broken ground, and at the head of the trail was me.

Dara was looking at me, too. Her expression differed from Bari’s. Bari’s expression was confused and fearful. Dara’s face was something I had not seen before; there was confusion, as well as... hatred?

Why would she hate me?