Commander Rel was getting back to her feet ten meters away. I had burned two holes through her body, but that was not enough to keep an Adept down; as long as her head or heart remained, she was almost impossible to kill.

Her injuries would also heal faster, especially if she could call upon the essence around her to accelerate her recovery.

Her face had recovered the cold mask, but the fear was still in the eyes underneath it.

The moment she came to her feet, she began to cast. I don’t think the Commander was treating me like an Acolyte any longer.

She was building a configuration that would finish me, and she was being careful this time, building it slowly.

I was going to die soon, and I let her build the spell she was going to kill me with.

How many deaths have I suffered so far? It seemed such a strange and silly question that I would not have ever thought to ask myself before this moment.

But as I knelt over the bodies of my friends, I let her build whatever she was going to throw at me, because I had run out of casts that could matter...

That was the simple answer. In the long run, my powers were insignificant, and nothing I did would ever save me from the fall. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"When the thing in front of you is too big, the choice is not between fighting and running. The choice is between standing up and not standing up. That is the only choice you ever really have. Everything else is what happens after."

I sighed... even when he was not here, I could feel the strength of my father in my head.

Looking inside of me, I saw only three percent Anima Depth left within me.

Any other mage would be at the edge of death and madness at this point.

This three percent Anima would not do anything to the Commander. I certainly could not kill her, not when she was now fully prepared for whatever I could unleash.

But this three percent was not for her... it was for me.

I am standing up, even if it means I was going to fail... it was the standing up that mattered.

Coming back up to my feet was incredibly painful and slow. My body was not cooperating, since it wanted to be dead a while ago, but my will was forcing me to stay alive.

The hole in my left side was bleeding badly enough that I could feel the weight of the blood that had caked around my legs. I don’t think I had any blood left inside me.

My staff was gone, and it took half of my palm with it.

Mortal Shell was trembling with a kind of trembling I had not felt from it before; the binding had absorbed more than it had been designed to absorb, but it would have to last.

I looked at Commander Rel as I slowly came to my feet, and then she saw my face.

I do not know what she saw on my face, and I did not care, because I knew that whatever she saw would not equate to the things that were inside me.

Whatever she had seen made Commander Rel pause her casting configuration. The hand that had been building the cast lowered by an inch, as the fear hidden in her eyes grew.

Why would she be afraid of me? I nearly laughed in anger. There were tears on my face, but I did not know that my tears were blood, and my body should not be alive, and yet the stink of magic inside me was so strong that my hair was rising from my head.

Maybe I painted a scary picture, but it is a shame that appearance was not enough to kill.

I drew the last three percent of my Anima Depth into the channel for one final cast. I no longer had a staff to compress and aim my magic, and the cast was not going to reach her in a state that would matter.

Without a staff, my spell was not going to reach her at a velocity that would matter, and it was not going to do anything to the woman who had just torn my friends apart with her bare hands.

However, this cast would still be done, and it was going to be me pushing out the largest discharge of compressed self I could push through my dying body, and even if it did not do anything, Commander Rel was going to remember it.

This world was filled with madness and pain, but at the moment, the person that had shifted near the top of my kill list was not Rex, or the horned demon; it was Commander Rel.

"You took them from me," I said. My voice cracked on the second word. "I will remember you, Commander. I am going to rip out your heart, and make you look at it, and I shall do that again and again until I know all the flavor of your pain."

Commander Rel’s face moved, not by much, as her cold mask did not break. But her mouth tightened at the corners, and surprisingly, the configuration she had been building became a shield rather than a cast.

I was shocked that she must have decided that it was better that she defended against my final attack, than to finish me off.

A sneer touched my face as I raised my right hand that was missing half my fingers, and without a staff, I released the largest soul-cast spell I had ever produced.

My entire right hand exploded, alongside a large portion of my right chest, exposing a part of my lungs.

The soul-cast spell crossed the four meters between Rel and me as a tree of light, and this tree was screaming.

Commander Rel’s shield met it, and the shield held for a moment before the cast, and the shield destroyed each other in a flare that lit the camp from one edge to the other.

I fell on my back, coming down across the bodies of my friends. There was nothing left in me, but at that moment, I saw a small silver bell near my left, and I picked it up.

I had forgotten what this bell meant, but it was warm, and it made me smile.

Darkness began to cover my vision, and I could dimly see a figure holding an expanding ball of purple light hovering over me. I held the bell against my chest as my vision was covered by purple, and I knew no more.