The notifications hit all at once.
[You have killed...]...
Dozens of them, then hundreds, flooded his awareness in a cascade that made focusing on the battle ahead genuinely difficult for a split second. The system seemed to register the overload and adapted almost immediately — sorting the kills into clean categories. Ascendant-rank kills are grouped together with a total causality count attached. Sage-rank kills in a separate bracket with their own number.
No Archon-rank kills yet in the count.
Except Leon had detected several in the horde's lineup as the charge began. Moving deeper, more carefully positioned than the rest, surrounded by dense clusters of lower-ranked corrupted beasts, as if something was deliberately keeping them shielded. They shouldn't have been here — Archon rank appearing in a beast horde of this nature wasn't part of what anyone had reported about the corruption's spread. But there they were, and his awareness had found them clearly.
