Lightning was bedding into my flesh, and when this skill passed the 30 and crossed into the Acolyte level, from that moment, among all the gifts it would give me was complete immunity to Acolyte-level lightning spells.

While this would aid me against a foe that attacked me with lightning, its utility to me would be even greater, since I would be able to unleash powerful bursts of lightning from my body and not have to worry that I would tear my own channels.

My body would no longer be overheating from Acolyte-level spells, and my offensive power would take a large step forward. If I pair this with Mortal Shell, then I don’t know how far I would be able to push my lightning.

I let the small discharge running through my arms to subside for a moment, and I turned my attention to the staff.

∞

The staff had been humming since I sat down, although it was barely audible. My Staff Resonance was at twenty-eight, nearly at the Acolyte level, and it was a shame that all of this progress could not be carried over with my present staff, and every time I restarted the loop, my staff had to endure the same transformation that was slowly becoming more violent.

My Staff Resonance was growing to the stage where my staff would no longer be a tool for focus but something more closely related to the caster, and presently, my staff was so close to this stage that this transformation was the staff’s equivalent of an Attunement crossing.

No matter how I thought about this problem, I could not see a solution to it. Even if my staff transforms when my Staff Resonance crossed into the Acolyte Tier, the moment I die, the staff would go back to its previous state, and if I tried to touch it, it was unknown if it would endure the violent transformation again and again.

Well, that would have to be a problem for future Elric to solve. Right now, there was nothing I could do, and so I let the staff sit, and the hum continued.

I closed my eyes for a half-second and felt the convergence of Lightning Resonance bedding into my flesh on one side, and Staff Resonance pressing against the staff’s transformation threshold on the other.

The two were not coincidental. They were the same magic, expressed in two related vessels, a Mage’s body and a Mage’s staff, and the discipline that had been bonding to me was the discipline that had been bonding to the staff, and the bonding had reached the moment in which both vessels were ready.

I opened my eyes, and I felt the pulse of the earth change... the pyramid was awake.

∞

Anima Sensitivity at thirty-two registered a shift in the air, like the silence before a storm, a fraction of a second before the air carried the sound of the foghorn announcing that the pyramid had awakened, and the eruption was beginning.

The first crack opened somewhere east, beyond the ridge, beyond my line of sight, and with my new senses, I felt it open before I heard it, and I heard the demons begin to emerge.

I closed my eyes and listened closely, and I was sure that these demons were not emerging from deep in the ground; there seemed to be something like a portal that they were emerging from, only that this portal was buried below the ground.

As the first demon emerged, it was followed by another. And another. It did not take long before the screams began.

From a thousand meters away and using my new senses, I could now fully appreciate the scale of this eruption, and I knew I had just been looking at a small part of the camp before. Sometimes, to understand a situation, you needed to step back.

I closed my eyes and kept focusing on my resonance, even as I felt a line of demons begin heading towards me.

As I had suspected, someone had detected me leaving, but they did nothing about it when they saw I was not moving far from the camp, and the demons were here to kill me before I ran.

The bowl was a thousand meters west of the camp, and judging from the speed of the demons, they would be here in two minutes... not a lot of time, but I will use it until the last second.

∞ 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Thirty seconds before the demons reached me, I stood up and immediately felt the changes that had happened to my body. Lightning Resonance must have grown past fourteen, but I did not check; even my staff felt denser, and I noticed that the Focus Crystal on the top had shrunken until barely a third of it was left.

And still yet, my staff was still transforming... it would take hours, maybe even days, for this to complete, but I had no time, and I was worried that a single Focus Crystal was not enough to see this transformation through to its completion.

"Ah, a problem for future Elric."

The swarm of demons crested the ridge of the bowl. Chitin demons, with their angular black-shelled bodies, six-segmented legs, and mouth-parts like the edge of a vise.

To think there was a time when the sight of one of these made me freeze in horror, and now that hundreds were pouring into the bowl from the eastern face, I calmly lifted my staff, switched my Title to Demon Slayer, and cast.

Arc Lightning had grown, but demons of this magnitude demanded something with a bit more kick.

Lightning Cascade erupted from the blue crystal at the head of the staff like the root of a tree. The branching geometry I had felt in the blueprint was brought to life as the cast emerged as a primary trunk of blue-white discharge that struck the leading demon at the bowl’s eastern wall, and from the trunk, the arcs split, then split once into seven branches. Each branch found a demon, struck it, and split again.

For a moment, my eyes glowed blue from the reflection of the channeled lightning from my staff, and then I added Surge.