The second wave came over the ridge. Although I wanted to unleash my lightning, I held back and allowed the Avatar to take the body again because I wanted to watch.

This sounded colder than I intended, but that was the entire purpose of this loop.

I had pulled it back to ensure I could switch places between both places easily, and I discovered that this switch happened within a tenth of a second, more than enough time.

The cold sensation moved through my blood, and the hollow place opened, and my body shifted into the unfamiliar combat stance, and I stepped back into the passenger seat to learn.

The Avatar did not wait for the demons to clear the lip this time.

It stepped forward, left foot leading, the staff held at the low diagonal, and the open left palm at hip-height.

The shape of my body, why does it feel a bit familiar?

Bringing the staff forward, the passive Lightning Resonance discharge that had been gathering in my channels emerged from it as a single sustained sweep across the eastern wall.

Forty demons were stunned in a single breath as the thin lightning dropped them where they crested.

The Avatar moved into the heap before the first body had stopped twitching, and the staff came down, once, twice, three times, four, each blow taking a head with the casual efficiency of a man cracking eggs.

There was also the fact that it was flowing through the gaps in the demon formations as if it did not have bones.

The Avatar did not hurry, and its pace was almost routine, but this routine work was killing.

I watched the staff’s rhythm. The blows were not falling at the centres of the skulls.

They were finding small seams along the chitin’s edge, the joint between the dorsal plate and the head, where the shell was thinnest, and the staff was striking the seam at the angle that produced the maximum structural failure for minimum impact force.

Even with all the power I had in my body, the Hollow Avatar was not wasting any energy if it could.

The Avatar knew the chitin demons’ anatomy better than I did.

Then I realized that another reason the Hollow Avatar was doing this should be because it wanted to reduce the damage to the staff as much as possible.

Pushing so much lightning through the incomplete staff was stress enough, and whacking demons on the head with it could not help its structural durability.

I pulled back control before the last twitching demon finished cooling.

[Stored Essence: 668]

The cooldown began again. I had five seconds, maybe six, before the body’s passive discharge regenerated to the level needed for another sweep. The next wave was already cresting.

This time, I would handle the wave myself, and I lifted the staff. Surge engaged before the cast, and a small shockwave erupted from my position, followed by Lightning Cascade that emerged from the Stormbound Fuchsia in the branching geometry that was becoming part of my casting identity.

The discharge spread across the eastern wall in a fan of forty metres of reach with eight splits, and the wave fell.

[Stored Essence: 729]

Sixty-one demons in a single Cascade cast.

The math was already shifting. My current Lightning Cascade with Surge produced an effective kill rate that my previous loop had not approached, considering that I was spending just a tenth of the Anima I had used in the last loop.

I had barely blinked before the third wave crested, and I cast again.

∞

The fourth wave was larger. The fifth was larger still. The sixth had come close to clearing the lip when I realised I had stopped counting.

[Stored Essence: 1,247]

I was killing demons in cycles now. Lightning Cascade flowed through the staff for the larger waves, and the Hollow Avatar swept for the smaller and tighter clusters.

The pattern was finding itself, and it was not as if I was deciding it; the engagement with the demons was producing it, as I grew more comfortable using my new Broken-Celestial ability.

The Avatar’s combat was teaching me how to fight in the gaps between the Lightning Cascade casts.

When I had Cascade in flight, the Avatar’s passive discharge was regenerating, and I was producing kills at the staff’s full reach. When the Cascade discharge subsided and the staff’s cooldown registered, I let the Avatar take the body and execute the stun-sweep across the targets the Cascade had not reached.

The two systems were interleaving.

When I was in charge, my tempo was slow, but I had high cost but high output, while the Avatar’s tempo was fast, but it had low cost and relatively low output.

Together they produced a continuous discharge across the bowl’s eastern half.

I also discovered that with this tempo, my staff’s durability was being maintained. I was not using as much power, but my kill rate was not dropping.

The grass below me was charring, as the bodies were piling up. The air smelled like burned chitin and ozone and the faint vinegar-edge that the demons’ insectoid fluid produced when it cooked.

I was not tired. Mortal Shell at the Adept Tier was holding my body together at a baseline that the previous loops would have called impossible.

My Endurance was producing the kind of sustained-combat capacity that the standard Acolyte body did not possess, and I wondered if my new blood was helping me in this manner.

The deep Anima reservoir was depleting slowly... slowly enough that the regeneration rate was nearly keeping pace with the Lightning Cascade casts.

Although the cracked nine percent of my Anima Depth was producing its Anima at reduced quality, but were still in volumes that the casts could still use.

My body was a battery and a turret and a hammer, and the battery was now lasting for longer.

I glanced at the red sky, and I remembered when I thought that it would be beautiful to see the blood of my tormentors paint the sky red.

’I don’t know how long it will take, but I will kill you all.’