Six hundred demons. This was the conservative estimate that I had for the demons ahead of me... six hundred.

They came in a configuration that no longer pretended to be a swarm; now they were a single coordinated mass, as the chitin demons were moving with the precision of a battalion.

There was that analytical part of my mind that loved the order that these demons had, even in the midst of chaos; I even faintly found it a bit inspiring.

There must be a sort of swarm collective intelligence among these demons, but they did not seem to be very smart, since the game plan from the start was just having them attack me head-on.

A glimpse of the swarm of bodies coming towards me from the distance made me backtrack.

I see why there was no need for tactics when the swarm could overwhelm everything with numbers.

My breath escaped my body in boiling hot steam as I cast Cascade through the transformed staff, eager to see what it would give me. It already felt as if this would be the most powerful cast I would ever produce.

And just because I could, Surge supercharged.

The cast was the brightest cast I had ever produced, lighting up the entire bowl and extending for hundreds of meters.

There was no way that I was not drawing attention.

I felt power leaving me until I bottomed out at ten percent, and the Lightning branches that emerged from my staff split eight times. Then ten. Then twelve.

The transformed staff was carrying the discipline at a configuration the bare hand had not been able to reach, and the untransformed staff had not been able to sustain.

Without any crystal at the head of my staff, the claw that had been gripping the crystal had now opened up into a palm, and it was from the center of this palm that the lightning emerged, splitting into a fan that covered not just the eastern half of the bowl but the entirety of the eastern wall up to the ridge crest.

The branches kept finding demons, and the splitting kept splitting, and the cast was not just spreading, it was colonizing the swarm.

From above, I could imagine that this looked like a tree of lightning was growing from my staff.

The cast killed three hundred and eighty demons.

[Stored Essence: 978]

If my body had not instinctively stopped the flow of Anima when I reached ten percent left, then I could have killed even more.

The number registered in my soul as a kind of light under the baptism of the warmth that was pouring into me.

Nine hundred and seventy-eight demons. The Stored Essence at the start of this engagement had been one hundred and five. I had killed eight hundred and seventy-three chitin demons in less than four minutes.

I was Elric Voss, sixteen years old, a second-year Acolyte, and surrounded by the song of lightning and the bodies of nearly a thousand demons, I had become, briefly, a different kind of mage.

I let myself feel it.

The feeling was not pride. The feeling was closer to recognition, the kind of recognition a man has when he sees, for the first time, what he might one day be.

The Lightning that Orath had recognized in the last loop and called remarkable. The Lightning that, at full Adept maturity, could clear horizons.

I had glimpsed what that mage looked like, and that glimpse was everything.

The sixth wave came over the ridge, and a conservative estimate placed them at seven hundred demons. There should be more, but the mounds of shattered bodies in front of me were breaking their seamless formation.

I had begun to dip into the layer of my soul, but I did not feel the incredible strain that this should have cost me, not when I was swimming under the warmth that was pouring into me from the hundreds of slain demons.

My sense of self was being torn away, but what was filling it up was warmth from the deaths of demons, and that warmth would not last... it would never last, and I had to keep filling up the void that was growing inside me as I sacrificed the core of my soul to cast lightning beyond my means.

A small part of me knew that my present state was very dangerous, but that was soon sacrificed as I sent out the deepest cast I had ever produced.

The sound of lightning as it tore the air in front of me was so loud that if not for my present durability, my ears and eyes may have exploded.

My staff nearly flew out of my hands, as it seemed like I was holding on to a living lightning bolt that was struggling to escape.

My cast went wide and shot into the sky, but even though it was out of control, the part that reached the demons split into a fan that covered the entire eastern wall from end to end.

The branches split fifteen times, and that cast killed one hundred and ten in the first second.

I screamed in rage, because that was the only thing left inside me apart from the warmth of dead demons flooding my veins.

"You serve me..." A growl emerged from my throat that did not sound human. This was not Elric speaking; this was a being that was half lightning and half madness.

I forced my staff to point downward, the motion dragging down the lightning that was pouring into the sky and tearing the clouds above.

Shockwaves and winds rippled around me as if I had become the center of a storm, but my mad will bent my staff towards the demons who were fighting through the wind to reach my position.

"Crack!"

A small part of me returned at this moment, when my staff cracked in two, the top half spinning away and leaving me with a two-foot stick that was still glowing with the remnants of lightning flowing through it.

My staff had transformed, but this transformation was too quick, and it was not complete. I needed more than one Focus Crystal to solidify its new state, and I demanded too much from it as I soul casted lightning through the wood.

The Cascade discharge sputtered, the branching geometry collapsed into single arcs, the single arcs flickered out, and the cast stopped.

[Stored Essence: 1,088/10,000]

Nine hundred and eighty-three kills, and my soul was empty.

The seventh wave reached me.