This was one of the strangest things I had ever felt, and I was a mage.

We were the ones who dealt with the strange and the supernatural, but everything happening to me had exceeded the scope of what I thought of as supernatural.

I did not know how to give those instructions to the Hollow Avatar. The skill was rank one, and did the description not say that the Avatar would act according to the last combat instructions encoded before activation?

The issue was that I had not encoded anything, and I did not know how to encode anything.

Unlike my various disciplines and Auxiliary skills that were connected to my soul, giving me an instinctive understanding of how to use them, Hollow Avatar demanded more from me.

It seemed that I would have to learn by doing. The same way I had learned everything else, by dying.

I closed my eyes, and my mind went into my body, going through all the changes I had experienced in my last loop, with three words floating around in my head: Archon, Maker, and Daemon.

"I Charge You, Go Into Creation And Wipe Out The Children of Abaddon."

My eyes snapped open, and the pyramid pulsed.

This was the first time I was feeling this, and a moment later, the familiar foghorn sound bypassed my ears and arrived directly in my chest, and now I could feel another layer of this sound in the hollow place that was now the seat of my Avatar.

It sounded almost like a word... like a name, but I could not hear it clearly.

The sky above the pyramid began to change as red light bled across it, and a moment later, the ground began to crack.

In six minutes, a majority of the people in the camp would be dead, and so I had six minutes alone.

My staff completed its first transformation outside combat, and I could feel the deep spaces inside the staff.

Reaching this level placed the staff at the Adept grade, but it was barely holding on to that grade due to the fact that a single Tier 1 Focus Crystal was not enough for its advancement.

From the feedback from the staff, I would need about five Tier 1 Focus Crystals, or it would be better if I had a Tier 2 Focus Crystal, as that would properly beef up the foundation of my staff.

Minutes passed by, and I confirmed that my Title was Demon Slayer, and I could already see a wave of demons heading towards me.

I stood, planted my feet at the center of the bowl, with the eastern wall forty meters ahead, and I waited.

And the wait did not take long.

The first demon cleared the lip of the crack. Six limbs, iron-dark hide, the pale tendrils on its jaw, already searching for prey.

I did not cast; instead, I reached into the hollow place and gave the only instruction I knew how to give.

"Fight!"

I felt the space beneath my soul shift, and my blood seemed to turn to ice, and the Hollow Avatar woke.

There was no confusion or thought; my body simply moved without me.

My right hand lifted the staff, while my left hand came up, palm open, Lightning Resonance flaring at the skin.

I watched my legs widen into a combat stance I had never been trained in, but there was something about the posture that made my soul tremble.

And then my body cast, but it was not any of my spells, almost as if my Hollow Avatar could not cast spells.

Technically, I did not think my body was casting a spell, because only a tiny string of Anima was being used, not even being pulled from my core.

However, it was enough to light up all the channels running through my body from Lightning Resonance, and a sustained surge of raw electrical discharge, channeled through my body and then into the staff, erupted from the opened palm at the head of my staff.

This Lightning appeared thin, barely visible, but it swept in a wide arc from left to right, covering the eastern wall from edge to edge.

The first wave of demons, perhaps thirty of them, was caught in the sweep. The discharge did not kill them all, but it stunned them, locked their limbs, and sent them crashing into each other in a heap of twitching chitin.

I was stunned at what had just taken place. The amount of energy that the Hollow Avatar had used in subduing all these demons was about the same as what I would use for maybe two casts of Spark.

However, the Avatar had efficiently taken all the minor passive discharge of electricity in my body, channeled it through my staff in order to use its channel to spread out the cast, and this fell all these demons in a single breath.

This... this was ridiculous.

My body stepped forward with staff raised, and the Avatar brought it down on the head of the nearest demon with a force that cracked the chitin and sent dark fluid spraying across the grass.

With clean and efficient blows that felt as if my body was simply tapping the skulls of the demons, all their heads exploded in four seconds.

I watched and did nothing. I was a passenger in my own flesh, and the Avatar was driving.

My body straightened and prepared to step forward when I pulled back control from the Hollow Avatar.

While the first cast it had done was amazing, it would take a few more seconds before my body was able to passively regenerate the electricity running through my body.

The Hollow Avatar did not seem able to control the Anima in my reservoir.

I was back in control of my body, standing over a pile of demon corpses, my staff dripping with dark fluid, and my breath coming in short, sharp gasps.

It was not as if I was tired, but this strange form of breathing that I just noticed I was doing before I reverted back to my standard breathing seemed to be able to fill my lungs with oxygen, ensuring that my body was always in the best shape.

I had no doubt that with my present Endurance, my Hollow Avatar could fight for hours without stopping.

The next wave was already coming over the ridge.