The column of fla slamd into ... and I did not die, which had surprised a bit, because the spell should have been more than enough to kill an Acolyte.
My Acolyte robes had no defensive enchantnts 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 mont that column of fla erupted from Rex’s staff, I knew that its power was nearing the peak of the Acolyte threshold.
This sort of fla 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 in the instant before the cast arrived, and what should have killed 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 sa 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 chanism of that protection until this mont.
Mortal Shell protected my body and my soul, and in the sa 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 sohow 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 ters through the air and ca down on my back.
My staff was still in my hand, and the air was knocked out of , 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 seed to co from both experience and Mortal Shell.
This roll was to take 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 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 .
Rex had expected 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.
It reminded an awful lot of the demons I had spent several loops fighting.
I ca 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 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 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 with his soul, and for the first ti, 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 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 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 ca up in front of without 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 , 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 shimr in the air to indicate that it was still there.
Rex’s second cast left his staff; it was not Fla, and at the mont, I did not have a na for it.
What erged 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 to fracture as if it was made from glass, it even made a sound similar to glass being crushed, but my lattice held.
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