The column of flame slammed into me... and I did not die, which had surprised me a bit, because the spell should have been more than enough to kill an Acolyte.

My Acolyte robes had no defensive enchantments on them, and I had read enough of the second-year casualty registers to know about the deaths of Acolytes who had stood in the path of a discipline tiers above their own.

The deaths in the registers were of bodies that had been broken before the soul could finish registering the impact.

From the moment that column of flame erupted from Rex’s staff, I knew that its power was nearing the peak of the Acolyte threshold.

This sort of flame should have burned its way through my body in an instant, but I was not broken, and it was all because of Mortal Shell, as I felt the impact of the spell through the invisible weave that Mortal Shell had made around my flesh.

Mortal Shell at seventeen had pulled tight across me in the instant before the cast arrived, and what should have killed me passed through the buffer in stages.

The heat first, dispersed laterally across the binding before it reached my skin; then the kinetic punch, redirected along the same paths the heat had taken, the impact spreading across my whole body rather than concentrating where the column had hit; then a residual wash of pain that arrived as the buffer released what it had been holding, the way a hand releases a hot pan after the heat has passed.

This Broken-Celestial skill was, quite frankly, broken, and I had no idea that it had increased my defenses in such a manner.

I had seen that this skill would protect my soul even when I dip into my reserves, but I had never truly understood the mechanism of that protection until this moment.

Mortal Shell protected my body and my soul, and in the same manner, it could hold my soul together even as I pulled more from it than I should; it was also holding my body together.

If I had not killed myself in the last loop, which had somehow bypassed the safeguards of this skill, I wondered how long I could have survived against the demons.

Still, even though I did not die from this spell, my body was lifted into the air, but the kinetic load was diffuse enough that my body did not crumple under it as I crossed three meters through the air and came down on my back.

My staff was still in my hand, and the air was knocked out of me, but my ribs were not broken, and my skin did not blister, and I was alive.

My mind had not even caught up to what was happening when I rolled to the side, an instinct that seemed to come from both experience and Mortal Shell.

This roll was to take me sideways out of the line of a follow-up cast if Rex had committed to another attack.

However, he did not. Rex slowly cocked his head to the side, and despite the lack of expression on his face, I could still see the faint surprise in his eyes.

I had not just survived that spell, but I did not look even as hurt as I should be.

If Rex had attacked me with this spell before I fell into this loop, even if I survived it, I would be one heavily roasted Elric with two, no, at least three breaths of life left in me.

Rex had expected me to die, and I had not, and in his eyes I only saw calculation like a researcher looking at a result that contradicts the theory. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

It reminded me an awful lot of the demons I had spent several loops fighting.

I came up on one knee with the staff across my body and made the most important decision of the loop in the space between one breath and the next.

I switched titles.

Demon Slayer left me as I asked it to leave, the weight of resistance to demonic forces lifting from my shoulders, and in its place, I called Death-Touched.

The title settled into me and brought back the cool, faint pressure across my skin, the awareness of threats arriving as cold spots rather than as visual data, and in the center of my chest, a cold spot was blazing.

There were other cold spots, faint, scattered, at the edge of my awareness, but the chest spot dominated.

Rex had marked me with his soul, and for the first time, I knew what it felt like to be under the eye of a mage who wants to kill you.

The target on my body was sustained, unlike that of a demon, and it gave me a feeling that I could not dodge what was coming, which was not far from the truth.

Once a mage had locked onto you with their soul, then it did not matter even if they closed their eyes; the spell would follow the soul lock until it reached its target.

What Death Touch had given me was the specific spot that Rex’s spell was going to hit, and I knew that his next cast would target my heart, so I moved before the cast left his staff.

I reached for my most familiar spell, and Threadwork came up in front of me without me choosing to bring it up. The lattice, which was the dense structural weave constructed by this spell, could do almost anything, but I knew few configurations, and one of them was the lattice designed to slow fast things.

It appeared in the air between Rex and me, anchored in the four corners that my Concentration could now hold without strain, and I poured fifteen percent of my Anima Depth into the holding.

The lattice was bright blue for an instant, then colorless, but there was a faint shimmer in the air to indicate that it was still there.

Rex’s second cast left his staff; it was not Flame, and at the moment, I did not have a name for it.

What emerged from his staff resembled a bolt of compressed dark light that traveled in a way light should not travel, the color bleeding outward from the staff’s tip as the cast crossed the air between us, and the cast hit the lattice that I created, causing the space in front of me to fracture as if it was made from glass, it even made a sound similar to glass being crushed, but my lattice held.