My Overpowered Demon System

Azrael and the system had stopped talking.

More than an hour has passed since then, and Azrael had been practicing his lightning element.

"This is cool," Azrael said, turning his full attention to the lightning coursing through his body.

But beneath that calm, there was a flicker of discomfort.

Compared to essence, which moved with a natural calm, lightning was the direct opposite. It felt like a train running through him at full speed.

It did not slow. It did not settle.

It moved at a pace that threatened to tear his body apart from the inside of he slacked off for even a second.

"This should be my limit," Azrael groaned, forcing it to hold still.

This was just a preliminary test of how much lightning his body could contain at once.

The result was extraordinary. Far beyond what he had thought was possible.

He could channel more than a fraction of his total essence worth of lightning through his body simultaneously, and the quality of it was something essence alone had never produced.

Raw power ran through his frame as he flexed his arms.

"I know it is because of the improved essence quality, but lightning is something else entirely," he muttered.

"Before I develop any proper techniques, I should see how it performs in pure enhancement," he said, looking at the training dummy waiting ahead of him.

It was a tier four swordsman dummy.

Azrael lunged without further thought, his body a streak of pure orange.

The ground he had been standing on exploded, lightning running along the tiles until they burned to coal beneath him.

The dummy reacted, but not fast enough.

Azrael’s fist burst through its chest.

Lightning spiraled outward from the point of impact, arcing through the air like living things.

Everything within range that was tier five and below was destroyed in the aftermath.

The dummy itself collapsed into scrap metal, pieces hitting the floor with a series of sharp clangs.

Azrael’s eyes widened.

He had not even used the full extent of his abilities and the tier four dummy was gone in a single exchange.

He pulled the lightning back and looked at what remained around him.

The broken floor and tiles were already stitching themselves back together as though something invisible was holding the room in a state of constant repair.

But Azrael had seen the destruction before it was patched.

"Is this not too much?" He muttered.

Looking at the tier five scrap metal scattered further back, he understood that even a tier five dummy would not have lasted any longer.

His mind drifted to the dimensional beast that had nearly killed him the day before.

"I wonder how that fight would go now," he said quietly.

The distance between who he had been yesterday and who he was standing here now was difficult to measure.

Then he thought of Eriksen.

[Do not even consider it. You will get yourself killed,] The system said before the thought could develop any further.

Azrael laughed quietly.

He knew he was no match for Eriksen currently, but the system’s cold refusal only made him smile.

"I do not care," he replied, already moving toward the tier six dummy row.

He landed in front of one with a single tap.

Looking at its well defined frame, he activated the switch on its back.

Its eyes flickered to life, blue light stirring within its sockets as it looked up.

Azrael stepped back, watching it for a moment.

"Let us see how long this lasts," he said, then lunged.

The dummy tracked his every movement, eyes locked onto him.

As Azrael landed in front of it, it sidestepped, barely clearing the punch.

The impact sent waves of lightning crashing into the wall.

But both had already moved, leaving only streaks of orange and white in the space they had occupied.

Azrael drove a punch into the dummy’s chest.

The dummy caught it with its shield, absorbing the full force as though pulling it into a void.

Then it drove the shield into Azrael’s chest.

Azrael sidestepped, the shield grazing him as it passed.

The dummy did not slow. It pulled back and swung the shield horizontally toward his neck.

Azrael’s body had already mapped the motion before it completed.

He leapt over it, letting the shield cut through empty air.

From above, he locked both hands together.

Lightning gathered within the lock, burning the surrounding air as he brought it down over the dummy.

The dummy looked up at what was descending.

Then it dropped its shield.

’They can actually think,’ Azrael noted, still coming down.

That was when his body moved on its own, abandoning the opening and yanking him sideways.

He rolled across the floor before he could understand what had happened.

He did not need to wait long.

A beam the size of a tree trunk shot from the dummy’s head, punching through the air with a sharp crack and driving into the ceiling.

Azrael watched it leave no mark on the building.

But he understood without question that if it had hit him instead, there would have been nothing left to discuss.

"Who puts something like that in a training dummy?" He muttered, watching the beam fade.

The image of Jasmine surfaced in his mind and he shook his head.

That settled it. She was officially unhinged.

He did not let the moment pass.

Lightning poured down from the ceiling onto the dummy in a cascade of arcs.

The explosion did not come immediately.

The dummy absorbed it.

All of it.

"How much can you take?" Azrael asked with a smirk, sending hundreds more crashing down.

Before he could continue, the floor beneath him launched upward.

A hole opened in the ceiling and he passed through it.

Through the small gap as he rose, he caught a glimpse of what was left below.

The dummy’s detonation.

The explosion consumed everything. Other dummies. Weapons. Floor. Walls. All of it.

Azrael appeared in the living room, the floor closing behind him.