Commander Rel had not bothered to draw the staff when she had decided she did not need it for three Acolytes, and it came up now because the calculation that had told her she did not need it had just been broken by an Acolyte who had soul-cast through her defenses.

Her staff was longer than mine. It was made of a wood I did not recognize, dark, almost black, with grain that ran in patterns that hurt to look at directly.

The head of it held no crystal. There was a recessed cavity where a crystal should have been, and the cavity was empty, which meant whatever Commander Rel was channeling with this staff was something a crystal could not focus.

More likely, her attunement with this staff was now so high that she needed higher-tier Focus Crystals because her staff had already absorbed all the lesser Focus Crystals for its growth and now needed more powerful crystals. Both of these options were bad for me, but you see, at this moment, I couldn’t care less.

She brought the staff to a casting stance, and the very essence of magic, like tiny fireflies gathered around her body, as the sheer weight of her Anima Depth drew pure magic from the air, and even a mortal would be able to see the floating lights.

I did not give her time. My Anima Depth was at eight percent, and through the tears in my skin, you could see that my blood was glowing as if it was on fire, and Mortal Shell was trembling but holding.

The brightness behind the door of my soul was spilling outward, and the spilling was costing me, I could feel it, pieces of who I was venting through my channel; it hurt, by all the lights in heaven it hurt, but I was willing to pay the cost.

The second cast left my staff even more quickly than the first, and my entire staff burst into flame, but I held it with two hands, and the pain could not penetrate the haze of bloodlust in my heart.

I knew I was in a loop, but again, I did not care. The mind is a tricky place, and then there was my own, which was filled with pain, rage, and sadness, sprinkled with a dash of madness, and was nowhere near stable.

Rel met my cast with her staff. The dark wood of the staff lit from within with a not-light that I could not look at directly as the cast struck the staff.

The staff held back my magic, but the impact threw Rel back another meter; her braid had come loose from its tie, and her field coat began to burn at the shoulder and the chest.

She groaned in pain and anger, and cast back, quicker than I could have anticipated, and a black bolt that was not light crossed the four meters in less time than my eye could track, and Mortal Shell pulled tight on the impact, but the bolt went through the buffer, and tore through me.

The pain that this bolt caused was so sharp that I nearly screamed. Whatever Commander Rel had just cast was operating at a level that Mortal Shell at its present level could not protect me from.

I fell to one knee, with my left side opened up, but I did not look down to see the extent of the damage, as I could feel the warmth of blood pouring down my legs from the hole that had just been chewed across the left side of my stomach, and I knew that I may have lost ribs.

I was bleeding since mortal shell could no longer hold the blood inside my body, and the only thing on my mind at the moment was that I still had five percent Anima Depth left inside me.

It would have to be enough. I cast a third time, and a greater part of me vanished. I did not know what I lost, and I don’t think I had the capacity to even find out anymore.

I felt something go, some part of me that I did not have a name for, something that may have been the memory of a song my mother had hummed when she sewed, or the shape of a particular afternoon in the leather workshop with my father, or the way Mel had laughed when she said the word "intellectual" with three extra syllables.

I felt it leave through the channel of the cast, and I let it leave because there was nothing else I could spend.

My staff exploded, and I lost three fingers, but the lightning that left it came so suddenly and moved so quickly that Commander Rel could not block it, and the third cast hit her in the chest, and tore a hole through her body.

She looked at me with amazement before she went down on one knee like me; her staff did not fall from her grip, and it was being used to support her, else she would have collapsed on her face.

I suddenly realized that there was silence all around us, but I was too weak and focused on the Commander to even look around me.

The silence was four seconds long, and I had bought it with three casts, three pieces of myself, and the silence was four seconds.

Was this a fair price for my soul? I don’t know, I could not answer this question, all I know was that although I had forgotten my name, I had not forgotten the names of my friends whose bodies were lying not far from me.

And that meant that four seconds was enough.

I turned to look at them, and I do not remember the moment I started crying.

It was hard to move, and so I crawled towards them, and I fell to both my knees and held Bari’s hand, and his hand was already cold even though he had cast Surge less than a minute ago.

The weight of all the loops fell upon me at this moment, and I realized that I was not crying for them because they died here, but I was crying for all the moments that I had seen them die.