I heard a sound that I am not going to describe, because the thought of remembering it sickens me to the core.

However, I needed to remember... anything else, and it almost felt as if I was betraying the memories of those I love.

Dara’s body folded inward in a way that bodies are not designed to fold, and it sounded like what you would imagine every structural element of a person being compressed into a space that was smaller than the person had occupied.

What remained of her fell a few feet away from Bari.

I was on my feet without remembering standing.

Some part of me was screaming, and the screaming was not coming out of my mouth. It was contained somewhere inside my chest, as my grief wanted to explode from me, but I held it in, and holding was painful in a way that I could not describe.

Good, I needed to hurt.

Anima Depth, fifteen percent... It was too much.

Commander Rel was watching me; she had not begun casting again, and her face was cold. There was no emotion to show that she had just slaughtered two promising young magi in cold blood.

I could see the same coldness in her eyes, and I knew that I was next, and even before my mind could understand what I was doing, I stepped forward.

The step brought me closer to her, after I had been thrown across the distance from the first cast.

I could see a brief look of surprise in her eyes; she had not expected me to survive the first bolt of force she had sent towards me, and I saw her eyes pass across my wounds that were not bleeding.

That distraction gave me a chance to come closer until I reached four meters, and I released a burst of Arc lightning at my feet, which shattered the ground around me.

Commander Rel arched one of her eyebrows, a faint look of amusement in her eyes, and I grinned at her like the horned demon, and the fact that I was bleeding in my mouth must have colored my teeth red and painted a horrifying sight because I saw her flinch a bit, and what seemed like guilt passed through her eyes.

It did not matter because at this time, my Anima Depth had just dropped below ten percent.

I did not pause to brace for this change as I reached for the threshold I had crossed deliberately, and the door to the core of my soul opened.

The brightness on the other side of the door was Elric Voss... a hurt, very pissed off Elric.

I could feel my name even as I prepared to spend it and I could feel the small things, Mel’s small fingers that she wrapped around my hands anytime she wanted me to escort her to school, the pattern of the leather grain on my father’s apron, the line my mother had stitched into the picture above my desk that I had pinned up when I was eight, and her warm kisses on my forehead before I sleep.

Maybe others may have a more grander inner world filled with mountains and jade beauties, but I had my home; this was the substance of who I was, the self that the Anima Depth had been a measurement of, was right there, and I reached into it, and I pulled.

The first cast left my staff, and it was not Arc Lightning... It was a piece of me made into electrical form.

If I could slow down time for mortal eyes to see the detail of my cast, they would have seen that the head of the lightning bolt resembled my face, and it was screaming.

I could not cry out, and so my lightning would have to do it for me.

The cast crossed the camp toward Commander Rel, and she dismissively raised her hand to catch it the way she had caught Bari’s Surge.

I think she detected something was wrong the instant this lightning touched her fingers, but by then it was already too late.

Her fingers closed around the cast, and it did not collapse into her palm and be absorbed as she had believed it would; instead, it went through her hand, through her shoulder, into the field coat at her chest, and Commander Rel was driven back two meters, as the lightning disappeared into the distance after it had completely pierced her body.

Her hand was burned to the bone. The skin and the muscle and the cloth were gone where the cast had passed, and what remained was a charred stripe through her field coat and the bone of her hand exposed to the cold morning air.

She looked at her hand, then she looked at me.

For the first time since I had begun watching Commander Adis Rel, across the loops, I saw fear in her eyes.

I had just hurt an Adept as a second-year Acolyte, and if not for the sheer tenacity of an Adept mage’s body, that cast would have killed her.

I had been aiming for her head, but a weird magic in her palm had diverted my lightning towards it.

Commander Rel looked as if she were in her early thirties, but I had it in good faith that she was one hundred and sixty-five years old.

She had been an Adept for close to a century, and in all that century, there may have never been any moment when she had been badly injured by an Adept.

My spells when I burned my soul seemed to be many times more powerful than normal, mainly because I think I was able to compress my spells better than anyone else burning their soul, as Mortal Shell kept my mind focused when any other mage would be almost insane at the moment, and so a lot of their power was wasted and not focused.

The point was that she had not seen anything like me before... and I did not care.

All that pain inside me, all the rage... I wanted to eradicate every single piece of her.

With a small groan of pain, Commander Rel reached over her shoulder, and her staff came up out of the harness on her back.