Chapter 42: I pulled it off

Elliot stood in place, his body trembling with raging exhaustion, blood trickling slowly in an ominous stream down his bleeding, masculine face.

Yet...

A smile was carved onto his lips.

It was not a smile of relief, nor of a person who had won some miraculous second chance at life. It was the malicious, unhinged grin of someone who had just realized their absurd, impossible plan had actually worked in the middle of this nightmare.

Elliot looked at his massive fist, and a faint, broken chuckle rose from deep within him, tangled up with the pain of his wounds.

"Hahaha..."

His broad shoulders shook, and that dark smile stretched wider and wider.

"I actually pulled it off..."

In that moment, Elliot replayed everything he had done to reach this point, how every detail had unfolded exactly according to his design.

He had known, with absolute certainty, that he had one chance. One opportunity. Complete success or absolute ruin—nothing in between. An infinitely small window that left no room for error.

His mana was on the verge of total depletion. He was no longer capable of summoning or erecting a standard-sized portal, and he’d known that from the start.

But his heightened awareness had picked up on something else.

That strange, suspicious anomaly he’d noticed while standing on the railing—a tiny tear, a flaw in the fabric of dimension itself, hidden from ordinary eyes. At first, he’d assumed what his dimensional perception was picking up—sharpened ever since he’d gained spatial portal abilities—was nothing more than background noise. But his refined spatial sense had caught what the naked eye never could: a scar in the spatial fabric. An infinitesimal loophole.

And a loophole like that was all an insane mind like his needed.

He didn’t have enough energy left to construct a full portal, one large enough to pass his whole body through—so he hadn’t wasted a single drop of mana trying. Instead, he’d used the last treacherous dregs settling in his veins to exploit that one specific tear, forging a temporary spatial nexus between his descending fist and the empty air right in front of his opponent’s face.

Not a full portal. Not a complete spatial transfer. Just a microscopic, temporary crossing point—barely large enough to fit a fist through.

Elliot’s smile widened, his eyes gleaming with triumph.

"Precisely..."

The dimensional tear had been extremely localized—not some massive rift, just a flaw confined to a narrow pocket of space within the wing. Even that wouldn’t have been enough on its own; distance was the deciding factor. The closer his opponent got to the damaged point, the less mana it took to anchor the connection. If the enemy had been standing even a few meters back, his depleted reserves never would have reached him.

And that was exactly why Elliot had waited.

He’d endured the humiliating blows. Swallowed the pain. Let his sick, demonic opponent close the distance step by step, purely out of reckless overconfidence. He hadn’t been waiting for a chance to defend himself—he’d been measuring the kill zone.

The instant the monster came close enough to guarantee it could smash his face in, Elliot drove his fist downward—not at his opponent’s body, but straight at that damaged tear in the fabric of space itself.

And in the very next instant...

BOOOMMM!

The fist materialized out of nowhere, right in front of the demonic soul’s nose. The creature never saw it coming, never had a chance to react, before the strike crashed dead-center into its face and sent it sprawling down into its own blood.

Elliot stared at his fist, spattered with blood, for a few seconds, his pupils dilating as the smile crept back onto his face.

"A tiny dimensional tear... and one wild, stupid idea."

He chuckled softly, slowly clenching his fist.

"I never needed enough mana for a full teleport. I only needed enough for one instant connection point."

He lifted his eyes toward his fallen opponent, thrashing in his own blood, and burst into a roaring laugh.

"Hahahahaha!"

For the first time since this whole nightmare had started, Elliot felt real, absolute pride in himself. He hadn’t suddenly grown stronger. He hadn’t pulled some cheat ability out of nowhere. All he’d done was find a flaw in the rules of this world and bend it to his will through pure, calculated cunning.

The dimensional flaw had been small. Its range, limited. The connection had lasted barely a fraction of a second.

But that had been more than enough.

Elliot looked down at demonic Michael’s body sprawled across the floor, his smile slowly sharpening into something almost terrifying. He cracked his neck with a dull pop, and when he spoke, his voice carried the full weight of pure, unfiltered madness. He raised his fist in front of his face once more.

"Who said I needed a full portal?" he said. "Sometimes a fist-sized hole is more than enough."

The demonic soul tried, with everything it had left, to scramble back to its feet and fight before Elliot could press his advantage. But its head was spinning, dazed—that treacherous punch had appeared out of nowhere directly in front of its face, losing none of its momentum, none of its power, landing with its full, terrifying weight and shattering its nose beyond any hope of recovering quickly.

And Elliot was not the type to settle for a single hit, or to wait patiently for his enemy to recover.

Driven by deep, simmering malice, he shifted his feet back into their larger male form and raised one heavy foot, bringing it down in a crushing stomp straight onto the creature’s stomach.

He didn’t stop there. Over the next brutal minute, he rained down stomp after stomp, blow after blow. The soul tried desperately to shield itself, to avoid being crushed, but every attempt earned it another strike to the face—until it had nothing left to give, until its body could do nothing but empty itself of bile and blood right there under Elliot’s cold, condescending gaze.

Elliot kept kicking, showing no mercy, giving the creature no room to catch its breath or gather itself. He kept striking its face, again and again, until it had emptied everything in its chest and finally went still. Only then did Elliot stand tall over Michael’s battered, bloodied body—now reduced to nothing but faint, muffled groans.

Elliot reached into a gift box and pulled out one of the fur-lined cuffs inside—the kind meant to cover the whole hand, clearly intended for very different purposes than this—and used it to bind Michael’s hands, pulling the restraints painfully tight. Then he wrapped the rest of Michael’s body in sturdy rope, leaving him with no possibility of movement.

The grim scene held through the night: Michael’s body tied and helpless on the floor, while the demonic soul trapped inside him screamed and begged the System for help. But the System offered nothing. No response. No lifeline.

As the long hours of the night dragged on, the first light of morning finally crept into the room.

With the dawn’s arrival, the last spark of that malicious soul flickered out, erased completely from Michael’s body, and the greatest threat in the room simply ceased to exist. Michael stirred, blinking back into full consciousness, and his eyes fell on Elliot—who had already reverted fully back to his female body, collapsed into a deep, exhausted sleep, drained down to nothing.

He had, evidently, gotten dressed again before passing out.